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Dryad

Data from: Host phylogeny and functional traits differentiate gut microbiomes in a diverse natural community of small mammals

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Jun 23, 2023 version files 17.17 MB

Abstract

Differences in the bacteria inhabiting mammalian gut microbiomes tend to reflect the phylogenetic relatedness of their hosts, a pattern dubbed phylosymbiosis. Although most research on this pattern has compared the gut microbiomes of host species across biomes, understanding the evolutionary and ecological processes that generate phylosymbiosis requires comparisons across phylogenetic scales and under similar ecological conditions. We analyzed the gut microbiomes of 14 sympatric small-mammal species in a semi-arid African savanna, hypothesizing that there would be a strong phylosymbiosis pattern associated with the different body sizes and diets of the mammalian lineages present. Consistent with phylosymbiosis, microbiome dissimilarity increased with phylogenetic distance among hosts, ranging from congeneric sets of mice and hares that did not differ significantly in microbiome composition to species from different taxonomic orders that had almost no gut bacteria in common. While phylosymbiosis was detected among just the 11 species of rodents, it was substantially weaker than comparisons involving all 14 species together. In contrast, microbiome diversity and composition were generally more strongly correlated with body size, dietary breadth, and dietary overlap in comparisons restricted to rodents than in those including all lineages. The starkest divides in microbiome composition thus reflected the broad evolutionary divergence of hosts, regardless of body size or dietary composition, while subtler microbiome differences reflected variation in ecologically important traits between closely related hosts. Strong phylosymbiotic patterns arose deep in the phylogeny, and ecological filters that promote functional differentiation of cooccurring host species may disrupt or obscure this pattern near the tips.