As organisms respond to climatic changes in their own individual ways, interactions between species are likely to be altered and come under pressure. Species with strong obligatory relationships are likely to be particularly susceptible to such changes. The symbiotic relationship between animals and the bacterial communities in their guts presents one such system, but one that can be challenging to study.
Elvire Bestion from CNRS, Station d'Ecologie Théorique et Expérimentale, Moulis, France, and co-authors use an experimental warming approach to investigate the impact of temperature on the gut bacterial communities of the common lizard (Zootoca Vivipara). They find that 2–3 °C warmer climates cause a 34% loss of the populations' gut microbiota diversity.
The mechanisms driving this decline are not clear. Potential pathways include changes to the hosts' environment (for example, altered prey) or changes to the hosts themselves (for example, immunity). Irrespective of the pathway, higher gut bacterial diversity tends to be beneficial to hosts so climate-driven diversity reduction could turn out to be detrimental.
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Brown, A. Gut-wrenching heat. Nature Clim Change 7, 388 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3311
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3311
