Meeting Abstract
Insect microbial communities have been studied as a contributing factor to aspects of insect life including insect immunity, metabolic, and vectoring efficiency. The relationships between microbial communities and factors, such as distinct sex differences and larval-adult disparities, remain unknown in many insect species. Through investigating with the non-model Photuris fireflies, we allow for distinct behaviors and influencing factors between sexes and life stages of the same species. We hypothesize that there will be a significant difference in relative bacterial abundance between male and female Photuris, because males are not predatory as adults and, therefore, are expected to present with fewer bacteria involved with diet and predatory behaviors. We further hypothesize that there will be a similar trend in the analysis of life stages, as there is a notable shift between the diet of predatory larvae and non-predatory adult males. In this experiment, we analyzed the gut microbiome of Photuris fireflies using Illumina 16S rRNA sequencing to answer two questions- 1) How do environmental factors affect the microbiome and 2) How do life stages affect the microbiome? Through the use of metagenomic analyses, we generated tables of relative abundance by bacterial operational taxonomic units (OTUs) and analyzed the table relationships with ANOVAs to develop principal component analyses (PCA) based on the relative abundance of bacterial genera in Photuris gut microbiomes. Our results can inform studies in firefly conservation, insect-microbiome evolution and wider studies investigating the relationship between gut microbiomes and behavioral variation.
