Microbial associations and spatial proximity predict North American moose (Alces alces) gastrointestinal community composition

Microbial communities are increasingly recognised as crucial for animal health. However, our understanding of how microbial communities are structured across wildlife populations is poor. Mechanisms such as interspecific associations are important in structuring free-living communities, but we still lack an understanding of how important interspecific associations are in structuring gut microbial communities in comparison to other factors such as host characteristics or spatial proximity of hosts.

 

Here we ask how gut microbial communities are structured in a population of North American moose (Alces alces). We identify key microbial interspecific associations within the moose gut and quantify how important they are relative to key host characteristics, such as body condition, for predicting microbial community composition.

 

We sampled gut microbial communities from 55 moose in a population experiencing decline due to a myriad of factors, including pathogens a...