The Importance of Sociality and Diet in Explaining Variation in the Bonobo Gut Microbiota

Gut microbial communities or the gut microbiota are of increasing interest due to the important role they play in nutrition, development, health, and disease. Among primates, several factors, like sociality and diet, have been found to be important in structuring the gut microbiota. The relative importance of sociality versus diet has yet to be examined for bonobos (Pan paniscus). Here, we describe dietary, social, and gut microbiota data for 252 bonobo fecal samples collected from June to October 2017 at Iyema, Lomako forest, Democratic Republic of Congo. DNA was extracted, 16S rRNA libraries were prepped, and samples were sequenced on an Illumina MiSeq run sequences were then paired with nesting group dynamics and feeding behavior data. We found that the Lomako forest bonobo gut microbiota alpha diversity was statistically significantly explained by nesting party (a measure of party membership), the number of nests (a measure of party size), and month (a measure of seasonality). Nesting party explains 19.48%-20.28% of beta diversity in bonobo gut microbiota for Bray-Curtis dissimilarity metrics and 17.06%-21.38% for Aitchison's distance. Our generalized dissimilarity model results found that sociality variables, like geographic distance, explained the most variation compared to dietary variables. These results suggest that sociality may be particularly important in structuring the gut microbiota in the Lomako forest bonobos. Sociality may therefore be more informative than diet when examining the co-evolutionary history of microbes and their hosts in hominoids.