Are you what you eat? A highly transient and prey‐influenced gut microbiome in the grey house spider Badumna longinqua

Abstract

Stable core microbial communities have been described in numerous animal species and are commonly associated with fitness benefits for their hosts. Recent research, however, highlights examples of species whose microbiota are transient and environmentally derived. Here, we test the effect of diet on gut microbial community assembly in the spider Badumna longinqua. Using 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing combined with quantitative PCR, we analyzed diversity and abundance of the spider's gut microbes, and simultaneously characterized its prey communities using nuclear rRNA markers. We found a clear correlation between community similarity of the spider's insect prey and gut microbial DNA, suggesting that microbiome assembly is primarily diet‐driven. This assumption is supported by a feeding experiment, in which two types of prey—crickets and fruit flies—both substantially altered microbial diversity and community similarity between spiders, but did so in different ways. After cricket consumption, numerous cricket‐derived microbes appeared in the spider's gut, resulting in a rapid homogenization of microbial communities among spiders. In contrast, few prey‐associated bacteria were detected after consumption of fruit flies; instead, the microbial community was remodelled by environmentally sourced microbes, or abundance shifts of rare taxa in the spider's gut. The reshaping of the microbiota by both prey taxa mimicked a stable core microbiome in the spiders for several weeks post feeding. Our results suggest that the spider's gut microbiome undergoes pronounced temporal fluctuations, that its assembly is dictated by the consumed prey, and that different prey taxa may remodel the microbiota in drastically different ways.

Flexibility and resilience of Great tit (Parus major) gut microbiomes to changing diets

“…The establishment and maintenance of symbiosis between hosts and their gut microbiota are pivotal in the evolutionary history of animals, where microbial symbionts play a multitude of roles in nutrient management, host development and host immunity [1][2][3]. Diet and host taxonomy are major drivers of assemblies of gut microbial communities across diverse animal taxa, including insects [4][5][6][7], spiders [8], sh [9,10], frogs [11], mammals [12,13], and birds [14][15][16][17][18]. In vertebrates, most work to understand the importance of these factors stems from mammals and birds [12,17,19,20], with intriguing differences between the two [19,20].…”

Multiplex PCR targeting lineage‐specific SNPs: A highly efficient and simple approach to block out predator sequences in molecular gut content analysis

“…DNA was extracted from the spiders’ opisthosoma and 16S amplified from the extracts. We used a COI dataset from a different study (Kennedy, Tsau, Gillespie, & Krehenwinkel, in revision) for the same specimens (based on the primer pair described in Leray et al., ), as a comparison to 16S. PCR and library preparations for all experiments were performed as described above.…”

Wolbachia host shifts: routes, mechanisms, constraints and evolutionary consequences

“…Wolbachia host shifts per se were also not found to occur more frequently in spiders than in other arthropod orders (Bailly‐Bechet et al ., 2017). A recent study indicated that most of the microbiome of spider prey can be found in the gut of their predators, although the presence of Wolbachia in the spiders themselves was rarely observed (Kennedy et al ., 2020). Thus, although some arthropod predators are presented with ample opportunities to acquire Wolbachia from their prey, such transfers do not seem to occur frequently.…”