Egg protection in the absence of parental care: The gut and reproductive microbiome of Sceloporus lizards and its role in providing antifungal protection to eggs

Weiss, Stacey L.

sweiss@pugetsound.edu

Department of Biology

University of Puget Sound

Tacoma, Washington USA

For every organism you see, there are trillions of microbes living in and on them. Many of those microbes are beneficial, with positive influences on host health, behavior, and fitness. However, our understanding of wild microbiomes and how they help their hosts solve ecologically relevant problems is still largely unknown. In lizards, which largely lack parental care, a key risk to reproductive success is loss of eggs to fungal pathogens. My lab group investigates the role of microbes in warding off these fungal nest invaders. Using the striped plateau lizard (Sceloporus virgatus) as our model lizard species, we describe the gut and reproductive microbiome of this species, and employ a variety of methods to experimentally investigate the microbial protection of eggs. Additionally, we use comparative approaches to consider how the microbiome is vertically transmitted, and how it varies across sexes, seasons, generations, and species. Combined, our studies examine a novel hypothesis for the role of the microbes in wild systems, and provide a better understanding of the selective factors influencing lizards and their microbiota.