Dining local: the microbial diet of a snail that grazes microbial communities is geographically structured (original) (raw)
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Not just browsing: an animal that grazes phyllosphere microbes facilitates community heterogeneity
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Our understanding of Hawaiian arboreal snails’ diets remains rudimentary, hindering the development of effective conservation strategies. To identify important food resources, we tested the hypothesis that epiphytic microbial assemblages differ on plant species preferred and avoided by snails at Mt. Kaala Natural Area Reserve, where snail plant preferences are known from previous studies. Comparing microbial assemblages on plants that snails both prefer and avoid was identified as a potentially key step to moving research away from characterizing which microbes snails encounter, towards testing if microbial assemblages are driving snail plant preferences. We found that fungal and bacterial assemblages differed between plant species preferred and avoided by snails, indicating that Hawaiian arboreal snails may be selecting plants based on their epiphytic microbial assemblages. Previous microbes thought to be important, Cladosporium spp., propagated in captive rearing facilities, and B...
Phylogenetic relationship and habitat both impact the gut microbiome in two microendemic gastropods
Journal of Molluscan Studies, 2022
Bacterial communities associated with eukaryotes play important roles in the physiology, development and health of their hosts. Additionally, the composition of microbes associated with eukaryotes can be indicative of evolutionary history, environment and life history. Here, we investigated the microbial ecology of two sympatric caenogastropod taxa belonging to the family Hydrobiidae, Juturnia kosteri and Pyrgulopsis roswellensis. The diversity and composition of the microbiota were described based on high-throughput Illumina sequencing targeting the V4 region of the 16S rRNA gene. The observed bacterial diversity was distributed over 16 phyla, with the greatest number of 16S rRNA gene sequences derived from Proteobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Tenericutes and Planctomycetes. These results document the presence of highly diverse gut bacterial communities in the two hydrobiid species. While alpha-diversity measures were consistent across species and sites, beta-diversity measures revealed ...
SummaryHost-associated microbiota cari affect the fitness of its host i η a number of ways, including the modification of host-parasite interactions and thus the outcome of disease.Biomphalaria glabratais the vector snail of the trematodeSchistosoma mansoni,the agent of human schistosomiasis, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths every year. Here, we present the first study of the snail bacterial microbiota in response toSchistosomainfection. To examine the interplay betweenB. glabrata, S. mansoniand snail microbiota, snails were infected and the microbiota composition was analysed by massive 16S rDNA amplicon sequencing approach. We characterized theBiomphalariabacterial microbiota at the individual level in both naive and infected snails. Sympatric and allopatric strains of parasites were used for infections and reinfections to analyse the modification or dysbiosis of snail microbiota in different host-parasite co-evolutionary contexts. Concomitantly, using RNAseq data, we inve...