Vertically inherited microbiota and environment modifying behaviors conceal genetic variation in dung beetle life history

Diverse organisms actively manipulate their (sym)biotic and physical environment in ways that feedback on their own development. However, the degree to which these processes affect microevolution remains poorly understood. The gazelle dung beetle both physically modifies its ontogenetic environment and structures its biotic interactions through vertical symbiont transmission. By experimentally eliminating i) physical environmental modifications, and ii) the vertical inheritance of microbes, we assess how environment modifying behavior and microbiome transmission shape heritable variation. We found that depriving larvae from symbionts and environment modifying behaviors increased additive genetic variance and heritability for development time but not body size. This suggests that larvae’s ability to manipulate their environment has the potential to modify heritable variation and to facilitate the accumulation of cryptic genetic variation. This cryptic variation may become released and se..., , , # Vertically inherited microbiota and environment modifying behaviors conceal genetic variation in dung beetle life history

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.dz08kps44](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.dz08kps44)

This dataset contains information on the genetic relatedness of individuals (sire and dam), hatching success (binary variable where 1 indicates that eggs hatched into larvae), larval survival (binary variable where 0 indicates that individuals did not survive), as well as adult life history (development time [in days] and body size [measured as pronotum width in mm]). Missing data are indicated by 'NA'.