Correction to: The ISME Journal (2013) 7, 1003–1015; doi:10.1038/ismej.2012.171; published online 10 January 2013

Since the publication of this article, it has come to the attention of the authors that there were errors contained within the ‘Results’ and the ‘Discussion’ sections, namely that sequencing data derived from two tick species (IO and IP) were incorrectly transposed. In these two sections, IO should be read as IP and vice versa.

The Authors apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused.