Parental Care Alters the Egg Microbiome of Maritime Earwigs
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INVERTEBRATE MICROBIOLOGY
Parental Care Alters the Egg Microbiome of Maritime Earwigs Jordan A. Greer 1,2
&
Andrea Swei 1 & Vance T. Vredenburg 1 & Andrew G. Zink 1
Received: 10 November 2019 / Accepted: 14 July 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Recruitment of beneficial microbes to protect offspring, often reducing the energetic costs of care, is now recognized as an important component of parental care in many animals. Studies on earwigs (order Dermaptera) have revealed that removal of females from egg tending increases mortality of eggs due to fungal infections, possibly caused by changes in the bacterial microbiome on the egg surface. We used a controlled female-removal experiment to evaluate whether female nest attendance in the maritime earwig, Anisolabis maritima, influences the bacterial microbiome on the egg surface. Further, we analyzed the microbiomes of mothers and their eggs to determine if there are a core set of bacteria transferred to eggs through female care. Microbiomes were analyzed using 16S rRNA bacterial DNA sequencing, revealing that bacterial operational taxonomic unit (OTU) richness and diversity were both significantly higher for female attended versus unattended eggs. The core microbiome of adult females contained bacteria which have the potential to carry anti-fungal characteristics; these bacteria were found in higher presence and relative abundance on eggs where females were allowed to provide care. These results demonstrate that female egg attendance significantly impacts the bacterial microbiome of A. maritima eggs, and identifies specific bacteria within the egg microbiome that should be investigated further for beneficial anti-fungal properties in this system. Keywords Microbiome . Vertical transmission . Anisolabis maritima . Parental care . Eggs . Earwigs
Introduction Parental care can be defined as any parent behavior that increases the survival and/or reproductive potential of offspring [1]. While parental care functions to benefit offspring, it involves fitness trade-offs; parents must balance their energetic investment into thier current brood against the loss of resources that could otherwise be reserved for future reproduction [2, 3]. To circumvent the costs of parental care, many animals have evolved strategies to transfer some or all of these costs to other individuals (often termed alloparents). Strategies include cooperative breeding [4–6], conspecific brood
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-020-01558-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Jordan A. Greer [email protected] 1
Department of Biology, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave., San Francisco, CA 94132, USA
2
Committee on Evolutionary Biology, University of Chicago, 5801 S Ellis Ave, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
parasitism [7–10], and mutualisms with other species that directly protect offspring [11, 12]. In particular, interspecific mutualism
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