Table 1.
Colonies of Camponotus and Colobopsis collected in the Florida Keys, Florida, USA for the present study, and the number of individuals from each caste available in each colony.
Fig 1.
Summary graph of bacterial OTUs found in Colobopsis riehlii, Camponotus floridanus and Camponotus planatus colonies with 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing.
A. Different colonies and species used in this study and their bacterial communities. B. Summary of all OTUs found in Colobopsis riehlii. The main bacterium is Enterobacteriaceae in pink, followed by Wolbachia in brown C. Summary of all OTUs found in Ca. floridanus and Ca. planatus. The main bacterium is Candidatus Blochmannia in green. The yellow stars highlight samples that were excluded after the read depth standardization of 400 reads was implemented.
Table 2.
Patterns that explain bacterial community diversity.
Fig 2.
PCoA plots of bacterial communities associated with Camponotini samples (weighted UniFrac method).
A. Different colonies/species (axis 1 = 88.8% and axis 2 = 7.12%) and B. Developmental stage (axis 1 = 88.8% and axis 2 = 7.12%). Note that the "Colony/Species" category influences the bacterial community more than "Developmental stage".
Fig 3.
Nonmetric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) plot illustrating bacterial community structure among different colonies/species with 95% ellipses.
Bray-Curtis, stress 0.081, Axis 1: 0.9817, Axis 2: 7.471E-06 and developmental stage Bray-Curtis, stress 0.085, Axis 1: 0.9807, Axis 2: 0.0002. Note that species play an important role in structuring the bacterial community.
Fig 4.
Network analysis of Camponotini samples with edges representing the main community bacterial members.
A. The edges were colored according to the different colonies: MOR#59 –Camponotus floridanus in red, MOR#69 –Ca. planatus in orange, MOR#73 –Ca. planatus in green, MOR#62 –Colobopsis riehlii in blue. B. The edges were colored according to the different stages of development: egg in red, L1 in light green, L2 in green, P1 in blue, P2 in light blue, P3 in aquamarine, W1 in pink, W2 in light pink, queen in yellow and male in brown. Note that it is the same image as in A, but now colored according to the different stages of development.
Table 3.
Bacterial communities of Camponotus (Ca. floridanus and Ca. planatus) and Colobopsis riehlii are different.
Table 4.
Camponotus planatus from distinct colonies have similar bacterial communities.
Table 5.
There are microbiota differences in the stage of development between host species.
Table 6.
The same stage of development in different Camponotus colonies have similar bacteria.
Fig 5.
The colours in the heatmap indicate variation in the relative abundance of different bacteria in different colonies/species and developmental stage of Camponotini samples.
These range from 0% (light yellow) to 100% (red). We choose to show only OTUs with more than 100 reads, for easy viewing. Dendrograms were generated from Bray–Curtis distance matrices. Note there are OTUs restricted to specific colonies/species.
Fig 6.
Phylogenetic tree of the main OTUs, their closest relatives, and Blochmannia from Camponotini genera sequences available in GenBank.
The maximum likelihood phylogeny of the 16S rRNA region of the main bacterial symbionts of this study along with the closests matches on GenBank. Bootstrap support is shown on branches. The labels are given with GenBank accession number (GenBank sequences) or collection code (sequences generated in the present study—colored in red). The branch color refers to bacteria with Wolbachia in brown and Blochmannia in green.