Metabolically similar cohorts of bacteria exhibit strong cooccurrence patterns with diet items and eukaryotic microbes in lizard guts

Gut microbiomes perform essential services for their hosts, including helping them to digest food and manage pathogens and parasites. Performing these services requires a diverse and constantly changing set of metabolic functions from the bacteria in the microbiome. The metabolic repertoire of the microbiome is ultimately dependent on the outcomes of the ecological interactions of its member microbes, as these interactions in part determine the taxonomic composition of the microbiome. The ecological processes that underpin the microbiome's ability to handle a variety of metabolic challenges might involve rapid turnover of the gut microbiome in response to new metabolic challenges, or it might entail maintaining sufficient diversity in the microbiome that any new metabolic demands can be met from an existing set of bacteria. To differentiate between these scenarios, we examine the gut bacteria and resident eukaryotes of two generalist‐insectivore lizards, while simultaneously identifying the arthropod prey each lizard was digesting at the time of sampling. We find that the cohorts of bacteria that occur significantly more or less often than expected with arthropod diet items or eukaryotes include bacterial species that are highly similar to each other metabolically. This pattern in the bacterial microbiome could represent an early step in the taxonomic shifts in bacterial microbiome that occur when host lineages change their diet niche over evolutionary timescales.
The ecological processes that underpin the gut microbiome's metabolic response might involve rapid turnover of the gut microbiome in response to new metabolic challenges, or it might entail maintaining sufficient diversity in the microbiome that any new metabolic demands can be met from an existing set of bacteria. We find that the cohorts of bacteria that occur significantly more or less often than expected with arthropod diet items or eukaryotes in lizard hosts include fewer bacterial species than would be expected by chance, but that those species are highly similar to each other metabolically.