Mom: What have you been up to?
Me (mentally): Flushing the cloaca of 200 lizards with saline solution, why?
Me (out loud): Oh you know, the usual, science…
Recent climate change is a threat to biodiversity, and while many studies focus on climate-driven extinction risk of charismatic vertebrates such as birds or mammals, none to our knowledge has studied the consequences of climate change on their gut microbial communities. We experimentally studied how the expected future climate may affect the diversity of gut microbiota in a small vertebrate ectotherm. We found that warmer temperatures led to a large loss in bacterial diversity, and this might have further consequences on hosts’ survival to climate change.
Me (mentally): Flushing the cloaca of 200 lizards with saline solution, why?
Me (out loud): Oh you know, the usual, science…
Recent climate change is a threat to biodiversity, and while many studies focus on climate-driven extinction risk of charismatic vertebrates such as birds or mammals, none to our knowledge has studied the consequences of climate change on their gut microbial communities. We experimentally studied how the expected future climate may affect the diversity of gut microbiota in a small vertebrate ectotherm. We found that warmer temperatures led to a large loss in bacterial diversity, and this might have further consequences on hosts’ survival to climate change.
RSS Feed
