Alternative diets affect the monarch butterfly microbiome in early development

Here, we use monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus), a specialist herbivore with a chemically well-defined diet of milkweed plants, to investigate the impacts of host plant species and development on the gut microbial community. We characterize gut microbial communities and quantify bacterial load across the monarch lifecycle (parent adults, offspring eggs, larvae, pupae, and offspring adults) when larvae are fed on one of two milkweed species.