ArticlemBio2021
Why Did the Bee Eat the Chicken? Symbiont Gain, Loss, and Retention in the Vulture Bee Microbiome.
Article in mBio, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 41 citations in OpenAlex.
- Harvesting the Casualties of War:Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Gut microbiota of Brazilian Melipona stingless bees: Dominant members and their localization in different gut regions.PloS one · 2026Article
- Passive environmental and group-level processes drive gut microbiome composition in a wild corvid.Animal microbiome · 2025Article
- Article
- Gut Microbiota Diversity in 16 Stingless Bee Species (Hymenoptera: Apidae: Meliponini).Microorganisms · 2025Article
- Gut microbiota of BrazilianbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Melipona stingless bees and honey microbiota reveal the diversity, composition, and modes of symbionts transmission.FEMS microbiology ecology · 2024Article
- The honeybee microbiota and its impact on health and disease.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2024Review
- Pollen Diet Diversity does not Affect Gut Bacterial Communities or Melanization in a Social and Solitary Bee Species.Microbial ecology · 2024Article
- Environmental Effects on Bee Microbiota.Microbial ecology · 2023Review
- Article
- Neotropical bee microbiomes point to a fragmented social core and strong species-level effects.Microbiome · 2023Article
- Evolutionary implications of host genetic control for engineering beneficial microbiomes.Current opinion in systems biology · 2023Review
- Review
- Temporal Changes in Gut Microbiota Composition and Pollen Diet Associated with Colony Weakness of a Stingless Bee.Microbial ecology · 2023Article
- Deep Divergence and Genomic Diversification of Gut Symbionts of Neotropical Stingless Bees.mBio · 2023Article
- Bee breweries: The unusually fermentative, lactobacilli-dominated brood cell microbiomes of cellophane bees.Frontiers in microbiology · 2023Article
- The Impact of Environmental Habitats and Diets on the Gut Microbiota Diversity of True Bugs (Hemiptera: Heteroptera).Biology · 2022Article
- The effects of urban land use gradients on wild bee microbiomes.Frontiers in microbiology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Diet and gut microbiomes are intricately linked on both short and long timescales. Changes in diet can alter the microbiome, while microbes in turn allow hosts to access novel diets. Bees are wasps that switched to a vegetarian lifestyle, and the vast majority of bees feed on pollen and nectar. Some stingless bee species, however, also collect carrion, and a few have fully reverted to a necrophagous lifestyle, relying on carrion for protein and forgoing flower visitation altogether. These "vulture" bees belong to the corbiculate apid clade, which is known for its ancient association with a small group of core microbiome phylotypes. Here, we investigate the vulture bee microbiome, along with closely related facultatively necrophagous and obligately pollinivorous species, to understand how these diets interact with microbiome structure. Via deep sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene and subsequent community analyses, we find that vulture bees have lost some core microbes, retained others, and entered into novel associations with acidophilic microbes found in the environment and on carrion. The abundance of acidophilic bacteria suggests that an acidic gut is important for vulture bee nutrition and health, as has been found in other carrion-feeding animals. Facultatively necrophagous bees have more variable microbiomes than strictly pollinivorous bees, suggesting that bee diet may interact with microbiomes on both short and long timescales. Further study of vulture bees promises to provide rich insights into the role of the microbiome in extreme diet switches.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.