Journal article
Dramatic Differences in Gut Bacterial Densities Correlate with Diet and Habitat in Rainforest Ants
Integrative and comparative biology, v 57(4), pp 705-722
01 Oct 2017
PMID: 28985400
Featured in Collection : UN Sustainable Development Goals @ Drexel
Abstract
Abundance is a key parameter in microbial ecology, and important to estimates of potential metabolite flux, impacts of dispersal, and sensitivity of samples to technical biases such as laboratory contamination. However, modern amplicon-based sequencing techniques by themselves typically provide no information about the absolute abundance of microbes. Here, we use fluorescence microscopy and quantitative polymerase chain reaction as independent estimates of microbial abundance to test the hypothesis that microbial symbionts have enabled ants to dominate tropical rainforest canopies by facilitating herbivorous diets, and compare these methods to microbial diversity profiles from 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing. Through a systematic survey of ants from a lowland tropical forest, we show that the density of gut microbiota varies across several orders of magnitude among ant lineages, with median individuals from many genera only marginally above detection limits. Supporting the hypothesis that microbial symbiosis is important to dominance in the canopy, we find that the abundance of gut bacteria is positively correlated with stable isotope proxies of herbivory among canopy-dwelling ants, but not among ground-dwelling ants. Notably, these broad findings are much more evident in the quantitative data than in the 16S rRNA sequencing data. Our results provide quantitative context to the potential role of bacteria in facilitating the ants' dominance of the tropical rainforest canopy, and have broad implications for the interpretation of sequence-based surveys of microbial diversity.
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Details
- Title
- Dramatic Differences in Gut Bacterial Densities Correlate with Diet and Habitat in Rainforest Ants
- Creators
- Jon G. Sanders - Harvard UniversityPiotr Lukasik - Drexel UniversityMegan E. Frederickson - University of TorontoJacob A. Russell - Drexel UniversityRyuichi Koga - National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and TechnologyRob Knight - University of California San DiegoNaomi E. Pierce - Harvard University
- Publication Details
- Integrative and comparative biology, v 57(4), pp 705-722
- Publisher
- Oxford Univ Press
- Number of pages
- 18
- Grant note
- Putnam Expedition grant NSERC; Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) DDIG 1110515; IOS-1638630 / National Science Foundation; National Science Foundation (NSF) PE13061 / Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science Short-Term Postdoctoral Fellowship; Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan (MEXT); Japan Society for the Promotion of Science University of Toronto
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Biology
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:000412708600005
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-85034090132
- Other Identifier
- 991019168508204721
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- Collaboration types
- Domestic collaboration
- International collaboration
- Web of Science research areas
- Zoology