Endosymbiont diversity in brown widow spiders

We investigated endosymbiont diversity and prevalence across putative native and invasive populations of the brown widow spider, Latrodectus geometricus, predicting lower endosymbiont diversity across the invasive range compared to the native range. We characterized the microbial community in the putative native (South Africa) and invasive (Israel and the United States) ranges via high throughput 16S sequencing of 103 adult females.