Abstract
Praying mantids are predators that consume a wide variety of insects. While the gut microbiome of carnivorous mammals is distinct from that of omnivores and herbivores, the role of the gut microbiome among predatory insects is relatively understudied. Praying mantids are the closest known relatives to termites and cockroaches, which are known for their diverse gut microbiota. However, little is known about the mantid gut microbiota or their importance to host health. In this work, we report the results of a 16S rRNA gene-based study of gut microbiome composition in adults and late-instar larvae of three mantid species. We found that the praying mantis gut microbiome exhibits substantial variation in bacterial diversity and community composition. The hindgut of praying mantids were often dominated by microbes that are present in low abundance or not found in the guts of their insect prey. Future studies will explore the role of these microbes in the digestion of the dietary substrates and/or the degradation of toxins produced by their insect prey.
Highlights
The gut microbiota of insects and other animals is known to play key roles in shaping host health
Our work suggests that praying mantids have a unique, host-associated gut microbiota that exhibits a distinct phylogenetic profile from the gut microbiota of prey and is dominated by lineages that are either not found or not abundant in cockroaches. This result is in contrast to emerging work on the caterpillar gut microbiome, which demonstrates some insects have no resident microbiota and instead harbor transient, diet-associated microbiota [63]
While all mantids were fed cockroaches in the final weeks of the study, mantids were fed a combination of D. melanogaster and D. hydei until large enough to safely consume cockroach nymphs
Summary
The gut microbiota of insects and other animals is known to play key roles in shaping host health. The gut microbiomes of many insect species have been studied extensively [2, 4,5,6,7,8,9], little work has been done that explicitly examines the gut microbiome of mantids (Dictyoptera: Mantodea). This order is of interest for several reasons. Relatively little is currently known about the gut microbiota of insect predators. Tiede et al [12] recently found that lady beetles that
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