Privatization of a breeding resource by the burying beetle Nicrophorus vespilloides

15 It is still poorly understood how animal behaviour shapes bacterial communities and their evolution. 16 We use burying beetles, Nicrophorus vespilloides, to investigate how animal behaviour impacts the 17 assembly of bacterial communities. Burying beetles use small vertebrate carcasses as breeding 18 resources, which they roll into a ball, smear with antimicrobial exudates and bury. Using high19 throughput sequencing we characterize bacterial communities on fresh mouse carcasses, aged 20 carcasses prepared by beetles, and aged carcasses that were manually buried. The long-standing 21 hypothesis that burying beetles ‘clean’ the carcass from bacteria is refuted, as we found higher loads 22 of bacterial DNA in beetle-prepared carcasses. Beetle-prepared carcasses were similar to fresh 23 carcasses in terms of species richness and diversity. Beetle-prepared carcasses distinguish themselves 24 from manually buried carcasses by the reduction of groups such as Proteobacteria and increase of 25 groups such as Flavobacteriales and Clostridiales. Network analysis suggests that, despite differences 26 in membership, network topology is similar between fresh and beetle-prepared carcasses. We then 27 examined the bacterial communities in guts and exudates of breeding and non-breeding beetles. 28 Breeding was associated with higher diversity and species richness. Breeding beetles exhibited several 29 bacterial groups in common with their breeding resource, but that association is likely to disappear 30 after breeding. 31 . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was . http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/065326 doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online Jul. 22, 2016;