Department of Biology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA.
Department of Integrative Biology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA.
Biol Lett. 2019 Sep 27;15(9):20190436. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2019.0436. Epub 2019 Sep 25.
Social animals that live in domiciles constructed from biomaterials may facilitate microbial growth. Spider webs are one of the most conspicuous biomaterials in nature, yet almost nothing is known about the potential for webs to harbour microbes, even in social spiders that live in dense, long-term aggregations. Here, we tested whether the dominant bacteria present in social spider webs vary across sampling localities and whether the more permanent retreat web harbours compositionally distinct microbes from the more ephemeral capture webs in the desert social spider, . We also sampled spider cuticles and prey items in a subset of colonies. We found that spider colonies across large spatial scales harboured similar web-associated bacterial communities. We also found substantial overlap in bacterial community composition between spider cuticle, prey and web samples. These data suggest that social spider webs can harbour characteristic microbial communities and potentially facilitate microbial transmission among individuals, and this study serves as the first step towards understanding the microbial ecology of these peculiar animal societies.
居住在由生物材料构建的住所中的群居动物可能会促进微生物的生长。蜘蛛网是自然界中最显眼的生物材料之一，但几乎没有人知道蜘蛛网是否有可能容纳微生物，即使是那些生活在密集、长期聚集的群居蜘蛛中也是如此。在这里，我们测试了在社会蜘蛛的蛛网中，主导细菌是否会因采样地点的不同而发生变化，以及更持久的隐匿蛛网是否会从更短暂的捕获蛛网中分离出成分不同的微生物， 。我们还在一部分殖民地中抽样蜘蛛的外皮和猎物。我们发现，跨越大空间尺度的蜘蛛群体具有相似的与蛛网相关的细菌群落。我们还发现蜘蛛外皮、猎物和蛛网样本之间的细菌群落组成有很大的重叠。这些数据表明，社会蜘蛛的蛛网可以容纳具有特征性的微生物群落，并有可能促进个体之间的微生物传播，这项研究是了解这些特殊动物社会的微生物生态学的第一步。
