Targeted Manipulation of Abundant and Rare Taxa in the Daphnia magna Microbiota with Antibiotics Impacts Host Fitness Differentially

Abstract

Understanding the contributions of rare and abundant taxa to host fitness is an outstanding question in host microbial ecology. In this study, we use the model zooplankton Daphnia magna and its relatively simple cohort of bacterial taxa to disentangle the roles of distinct taxa in host life history metrics, using a suite of antibiotics to selectively reduce the abundance of functionally important taxa.