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

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, the

SUBMITTER: Hendriks KP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7900957 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature