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Foraging strategies and geographic factors jointly shape gut microbiota of spiders in the Sichuan and Guizhou regions of China

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Abstract

Spiders, a keystone predatory group for terrestrial ecosystem balance, have underexplored gut microbiotas. We collected 1090 spiders from 34 families in southwestern China, performing 16S rRNA sequencing to investigate their gut microbiota. Wandering and ambushing spiders exhibited higher α-diversity, while web-building spiders showed the lowest α-diversity with the highest endosymbiont infection rates. Gut microbiota diversity was significantly higher in Guizhou-region spiders than in Sichuan-region spiders. All spiders showed high amount of endosymbiont ASVs, which varied with foraging strategies and regions. Additionally, closer geographic distances between spiders were associated with more similar gut microbiota diversity levels. Environmental factor analysis preliminary revealed a positive correlation between precipitation and gut microbiota diversity, though its generalizability is limited by geographic sampling. Random processes were the primary drivers of spiders’ gut microbial community assembly. Our findings highlight that spider gut microbiota assembly is predominantly driven by stochastic processes but regulated by foraging strategies and geographic factors, providing a framework for understanding predator-microbe interactions in spiders.

Data availability

The raw sequencing reads from this study have been submitted to the China National GeneBank Database (CNP0007324; CNGBdb, https://db.cngb.org/) and Genome Sequence Archive database (PRJCA051897: CRA034046; GSA, https://ngdc.cncb.ac.cn/gsa/).

Code availability

The analysis code has been submitted to GitHub (https://github.com/WJiao95/16S-spider) and Zenodo85 (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17640349).

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Acknowledgements

We especially thank Professor Hao Yu at the College of Life Sciences, Guizhou Normal University for the sample collection in Guizhou. We also express our gratitude to the members of our research group for their hard work in the field of sample collection in Sichuan. They are Mian Wei, Qiuqiu Zhang, Qian Chen, Xuewei Geng, Yiting He, Xuelian Weng, Hanlin Wang, and Yuanhao Du.

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Jiao Wang, Shuqiao Wang.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Bio-Resources and Eco-Environment of Ministry of Education, College of Life Sciences, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China

    Jiao Wang, Shuqiao Wang, Qian Chen, Chuang Zhou, Zhenxin Fan & Yucheng lin

  2. Sichuan Key Laboratory of Conservation Biology on Endangered Wildlife, College of Life Sciences, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China

    Jiao Wang, Shuqiao Wang, Qian Chen, Zhenxin Fan & Yucheng lin

  3. College of Life Sciences, Sichuan Normal University, Chengdu, China

    Chuang Zhou

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  1. Jiao Wang
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  4. Chuang Zhou
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Contributions

Jiao Wang and Shuqiao Wang performed the bioinformatics analyses; Jiao Wang wrote the manuscript; Shuqiao Wang, Chuang Zhou, and Qian Chen collected the samples; Zhenxin Fan and Yuchen Lin revised the manuscript, designed, and supervised the study.

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Zhenxin Fan or Yucheng lin.

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Communications Biology thanks Marc Domènech, Evgeniia Propistsova, Hirokazu Toju, Jordan Cuff and the other anonymous reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary handling editors: Hannes Schuler and Tobias Goris.

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Wang, J., Wang, S., Chen, Q. et al. Foraging strategies and geographic factors jointly shape gut microbiota of spiders in the Sichuan and Guizhou regions of China.
Commun Biol (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-025-09358-0

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