Host ecology drives frog skin microbiome diversity across ecotone in South-Central North America

Abstract

Anurans (frogs and toads) are an ecologically diverse group of vertebrate organisms that display a myriad of reproductive modes and life history traits. To persist in such an expansive array of habitats, these organisms have evolved specialized skin that is used for respiration while also protecting against moisture loss, pathogens, and environmental contaminants. Anuran skin is also colonized by communities of symbiotic microorganisms, and these skin microbiota serve critical roles in numerous processes associated with anuran host health and persistence such as pathogen resistance and immunity. However, gaps remain in our understanding of the environmental and evolutionary processes that shape frog skin microbial communities. Here, we combined existing anuran disease data with 16S rRNA skin microbial inventories to elucidate the roles that geographic location, host evolutionary history, host ecology, and pathogen presence play in the microbial community assemblage of five co-distributed frog host species in Oklahoma. These focal species possess distinct ecological preferences: aquatic, semi-aquatic, and arboreal, and our results indicate that host ecology is the primary driver of frog skin microbial community structure. Additionally, compositional differences were observed among select host species based on geographic location, but this was not consistent among all five frog species. We did not find evidence of phylogenetic signal among our samples and results from the Classification and Regression Tree Analysis revealed that the presence of the amphibian pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis and the severity of infection were not drivers of skin microbiome differences among our focal host species. Results from this comparative study contribute to our growing understanding of the environmental and host-associated drivers of skin microbial community assemblage and represents one of the first studies on landscape-level variation in skin microbial communities among North American frogs.