Effects of habitat disturbance on host microbiota

We evaluated the microbiota species richness and community composition of two sympatric insect species (Melitaea cinxia and Mecinus pascuorum) from the Aland archipelago, Finland, to gain insights onto how habitat disturbances affect the bacterial communities associated with wild species. We sampled habitat patches surrounded by either natural environments (eg. forests, seashores) or human activities (eg. roads, agriculture fields, buildings) and quantified the effects of habitat disturbance on host microbiota using 16S rRNA sequencing.