Joint species distribution modelling of insect microbiota: Time to jump onto a new opportunity

Otso Ovaskainen, Piotr Łukasik, Tomas Roslin

How microbes influence insects, each other and vice versa, is a topical question in insect science. With this contribution, we highlight joint species distribution models (JSDMs) as a statistical framework particularly well suited for resolving it. While JSDM has been widely applied to micro-biota of organisms other than insects, only a handful of studies have applied them thus far to insect microbiota. To encourage insect microbiota researchers to catch up with the benefits of JSDM, we introduce the statistical and ecological basics of JSDM and give flesh to the modelling framework by reviewing how it has so far been applied to insect microbiota. We highlight the power of JSDMs in separating host, environmental and microbial drivers of community assembly, and in generating hypotheses about how different microbes influence each other. To stimulate a broad adoption of JSDMs in studies of insect microbiota, we propose a predictive framework for identifying and characterizing five ecological categories of insect-associated microbes: (1) obligate nutritional symbionts; (2) facultative endosymbionts; (3) specialized gut associates; (4) transient microbes; and (5) pathogens and parasites. In particular, we hypothesize how the ecological characteristics of these different microbial categories are reflected in the statistical signatures recovered by JSDMs. We further suggest how JSDM can be applied to address the phylogenetic and ecological scales at which microbiome patterns are structured and to uncover how global environmental changes may reshape insect microbiota.