What goes up might come down: The spectacular spread of an endosymbiont is followed by its decline a decade later

Facultative, intracellular bacterial symbionts of arthropods may dramatically affect host biology and reproduction. The length of these symbiont-host associations may be thousands to millions of years, and while symbiont loss is predicted, there have been very few observations of a decline of symbiont infection rates. In a population of the sweetpotato whitefly species (Bemisia tabaci MEAM1) in Arizona, USA, we had documented frequency decline of a strain of Rickettsia in the bellii clade from near-fixation in 2011 to 36% of whiteflies infected in 2017. In the current study we established matrilines of whiteflies from the field and studied a) Rickettsia vertical transmission, b) fitness and sex ratios associated with Rickettsia infection, c) symbiont titer, and d) bacterial communities within whiteflies. The sequences in this SRA dataset address objective (d), characterization of the bacterial communities within the experimental whiteflies. Based on these data, we found no evidence that Rickettsia was replaced by another secondary symbiont.