Microbial transfer through fecal strings on eggs affect leaf beetle microbiome dynamics

Gut microbiomes of holometabolous insects can be strongly affected by the metamorphosis. Previous studies suggest that microbiome colonization and community development often rely on specialized transmission routes between host life stages, but there is a lack of comparative studies of microbial community dynamics due to different transmission mechanisms. We compared the gut microbial community dynamics across life stages for five Galerucella species that differ in a potential microbial transfer mechanism by sequencing amplicons of the 16S rRNA gene. Females of three of the studied species place fecal strings on top of the egg, which may improve the transfer of gut microbes, unlike females of the two other species. We found the α-diversity was more stable between life stages in fecal string placer-species compared with the non-fecal string placer-species. Moreover, there were consistent differences in the microbiome between species, where we identified multiple taxa in each species that..., , , # Data from: Microbial transfer through fecal strings on eggs affect leaf beetle microbiome dynamics

Data for microbial communities in five Galerucella leaf beetles, across 5 life stages (eggs, newly hatched larvae, three-week old larvae, pupae and newly hatched adults), based on sequencing of the V3-V4 hypervariable 128 regions (480 bp) of the 16S rRNA gene.

Host beetle species include G. lineola (Fabricius, 1781), G. pusilla (Duftschmid, 1825), G. calmariensis (L., 1767), G. nymphaea (L., 1758) and G. sagittariae (Gyllenhal, 1813). They differ in one key trait. Females of G. lineola, G. pusilla and G. calmariensis deposit a fecal string on the egg whereas G. nymphaea and G. sagittariae do not.

## Description of the data and file structure

The data includes four files:

ASV table – This file contains the number of reads for each ASV (column A, N=9661) across all included Sample ID #201-386 (N=172, Column B-FQ). ASV’s from mitochondria and chloroplasts are excluded. Identities of AS...,