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bioRxiv · 10.64898/2026.04.16.718993

Consistent, scale-dependent differences in the biogeography of host-associated and free-living microbiomes across systems

Dominguez, J. H.·Haerer, A.·Wall, C. B.·Rennison, D. J.·Symons, C. C.·Shurin, J. B.
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Abstract

Microbial communities are critical to the functioning of ecosystems and shape the ecology and evolution of host organisms. However, we have a limited understanding of how host-associated and free-living microbes differ in their structure and biogeography. Here, we test whether host-associated (fish gut) and free-living (lake bacterioplankton) microbes exhibit different metacommunity structure, spatial turnover, and consistency with neutral expectations using two independent lake systems. We characterized microbial communities in lake water (Vancouver Island and Sierra Nevada) and guts in two fish species (stickleback and brook trout) using 16S amplicon sequencing. We compared alpha and beta diversity within lakes, quantified spatial turnover (distance-decay), and tested for departure from neutral abundance-occurrence expectations between bacterioplankton and fish gut microbiomes. Fish microbiomes had lower alpha diversity compared to bacterioplankton, but higher beta diversity within lakes. Bacterioplankton were more similar across lakes yet showed stronger patterns of spatial turnover with distance than fish gut microbiomes. A neutral model explained a substantial proportion of abundance-occurrence relationships in bacterioplankton communities but performed poorly for fish-associated microbes. Our study indicates that host-associated and free-living microbes have disparate patterns of metacommunity structure and spatial turnover consistent with differences in the strength of neutral ecological processes. Fish microbiomes were less diverse at the local scale but more variable across space and time than bacterioplankton communities, suggestive of potentially strong local selection and/or reduced microbial exchange among hosts compared to environmental communities. Importantly, we observed highly consistent patterns across both lake systems despite differences in host species, sampling design, and region, demonstrating that differences in the distribution of host and environmental microbes are potentially widespread. This study demonstrates how host association fundamentally alters the diversity and spatial distribution of microbes, emphasizing the need to incorporate hosts into broader frameworks of microbial biogeography.

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Dominguez, J. H., Haerer, A., Wall, C. B., Rennison, D. J., Symons, C. C., Shurin, J. B.. 2026-04-21. Consistent, scale-dependent differences in the biogeography of host-associated and free-living microbiomes across systems. https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.04.16.718993

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