Received: 8 January 2018 | Revised: 7 February 2018 | Accepted: 9 February 2018 DOI: 10.1002/ece3.3977 ORIGINAL RESEARCH The influence of diet and environment on the gut microbial community of field crickets Soon Hwee Ng1 | Michael Stat2,3 | Michael Bunce3 | Leigh W. Simmons1 1Centre for Evolutionary Biology, School of Biological Sciences, University of Western Abstract Australia, Crawley, Australia The extent to which diet and environment influence gut community membership 2 Department of Biological (presence or absence of taxa) and structure (individual taxon abundance) is the sub- Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia ject of growing interest in microbiome research. Here, we examined the gut bacterial 3Trace and Environmental DNA (TrEnD) communities of three cricket groups: (1) wild caught field crickets, (2) laboratory- Laboratory, Department of Environment reared crickets fed cat chow, and (3) laboratory- reared crickets fed chemically de- and Agriculture, Curtin University, Perth, Australia fined diets. We found that both environment and diet greatly altered the structure of the gut bacterial community. Wild crickets had greater gut microbial diversity and Correspondence Soon Hwee Ng, Centre for Evolutionary higher Firmicutes to Bacteroidetes ratios, in contrast to laboratory- reared crickets. Biology, School of Biological Sciences, Predictive metagenomes revealed that laboratory- reared crickets were significantly University of Western Australia, Crawley, Australia. enriched in amino acid degradation pathways, while wild crickets had a higher rela- Email:
[email protected] tive abundance of peptidases that would aid in amino acid release. Although wild and laboratory animals differ greatly in their bacterial communities, we show that the community proportional membership remains stable from Phylum to Family taxo- nomic levels regardless of differences in environment and diet, suggesting that en- dogenous factors, such as host genetics, have greater control in shaping gut community membership.