Marginal link between sociality and gut microbiome in disparate mammalian hosts

Abstract Studies in model organisms and wild populations have uncovered manifold links between the gut microbiome and sociality, which, considering the adaptiveness of social behaviour, suggest a potentially generalized coevolution between microbiomes and social behaviour. Here, we leverage phylogenetically and ecologically diverse data from the Earth Microbiome Project to test the generality of the links between sociality and the gut microbiome in wild animals. We find evidence of a small but significant link between sociality and microbiome beta diversity, but not alpha diversity, in mammalian taxa, potentially due to socially mediated microbial transmission. Our work highlights the value of leveraging large-scale multi-study datasets to test fundamental questions about the role of sociality in host–microbiome coevolution.