Bacterial diversity of select Hawaiian insects

To gain a better understanding of the ways microbes shape insect diversity, we are inaugurating The Native Hawaiian Insect Microbiome Initiative (NHIMI). NHIMI will serve as an open-ended collaborative project with the goal of elucidating the role of insect-microbial symbioses in shaping biological diversity. To introduce this effort, we sequenced, for the first time, the bacterial microbiomes of 13 endemic Hawaiian insect species (8 genera and 7 families). Our sampling is designed to address two principal questions: (a) What is the diversity of microbes associated with insects that have widely different ecologies? And, (b) do adaptations to novel niches correlate with transitions in insect microbiomes?