Read on Twitter
OH HEY okay, so I told you I used to work on spiders. 
Co-authored w/ PhD student Benoît Perez-Lamarque & led by @Berkeley_Evolab . We look at the population genetics of the spider host (stick spider, Ariamnes) as well as their associated microbial communities
https://twitter.com/biorxivpreprint/status/1336498745270280192
Co-authored w/ PhD student Benoît Perez-Lamarque & led by @Berkeley_Evolab . We look at the population genetics of the spider host (stick spider, Ariamnes) as well as their associated microbial communities
https://twitter.com/biorxivpreprint/status/1336498745270280192
We find that the spiders, like many other Hawaiian arthropods are mostly genetically structured by volcanoes, with some curious admixture/sorting patterns in the center of the island and at sites with complex geographic history.
The microbes (broken into gut microbiota and endosymbionts) follow a different story. Gut microbes show the same basic patterns across all populations and even for outgroup species of Ariamnes on other islands, possibly due to their niche conservatism for...eating other spiders.
The endosymbionts however, show turnover between islands, indicating some sort of primacy or bottlenecking effect. And when an endosymbiont dominates, it really DOMINATES. There's not much coexistance for the diff endosymbionts in any pop especially for older sites.
This was our first foray into work integrating across the host and microbe genomics and we'd love to know what you think! We're also very curious to follow this work up by expanding across spider ecomorphs and across additional islands & arthropods 
I'll also add this paper was fun to work on because I had very little microbiome knowledge at the start, but learned a ton from my co-first author. It was challenging to integrate the data to tell the story, but I think what it does best is set the stage for more studies!
Gotta love when you end an analyses with a bunch more questions/hypotheses you want to test.
