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Microbiome and environment explain the absence of correlations between consumers and their diet in Bornean microsnails

Hendriks, KP; Bisschop, K; Kortenbosch, HH; Kavanagh, JC; Larue, AEA; Phung, C-C; Bonte, D; ... Etienne, RS; + view all (2021) Microbiome and environment explain the absence of correlations between consumers and their diet in Bornean microsnails. Ecology , 102 (2) , Article e03237. 10.1002/ecy.3237. Green open access

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Abstract

Classical ecological theory posits that species partition resources such that each species occupies a unique resource niche. In general, the availability of more resources allows more species to co‐occur. Thus, a strong relationship between communities of consumers and their resources is expected. However, correlations may be influenced by other layers in the food web, or by the environment. Here we show, by studying the relationship between communities of consumers (land snails) and individual diets (from seed plants), that there is in fact no direct, or at most a weak but negative, relationship. However, we found that the diversity of the individual microbiome positively correlates with both consumer community diversity and individual diet diversity in three target species. Moreover, these correlations were affected by various environmental variables, such as anthropogenic activity, habitat island size, and a possibly important nutrient source, guano runoff from nearby caves. Our results suggest that the microbiome and the environment explain the absence of correlations between diet and consumer community diversity. Hence, we advocate that microbiome inventories are routinely added to any community dietary analysis, which our study shows can be done with relatively little extra effort. Our approach presents the tools to quickly obtain an overview of the relationships between consumers and their resources. We anticipate our approach to be useful for ecologists and environmentalist studying different communities in a local food web.

Type: Article
Title: Microbiome and environment explain the absence of correlations between consumers and their diet in Bornean microsnails
Location: United States
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1002/ecy.3237
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.3237
Language: English
Additional information: This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Keywords: community ecology, metabarcoding, Gastropoda, microbiome, diet, Borneo
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences > Genetics, Evolution and Environment
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10118445
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