Social organization and habitat use shape the gut microbiome of a marine fish
Aina Pons, Eneko Aspillaga, Ignacio A Catalán, Tomeu Viver, Robert Arlinghaus, Martina Martorell‐Barceló, Margarida Barcelo‐Serra, Josep Alós · 2026
Read Social organization and habitat use shape the gut microbiome of a marine fish by Aina Pons, Eneko Aspillaga, Ignacio A Catalán, Tomeu Viver, Robert Arlinghaus, Martina Martorell‐Barceló, Margarida Barcelo‐Serra, Josep Alós (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13322172.txt.
Description
Aina Pons and colleagues link social life, habitat, and gut germs in a sea fish in a 2026 field study near Mallorca, Spain. Tracking free living fish and sampling their gut germs at once is hard, so the team used fine acoustic tracking on the pearly razorfish, Xyrichtys novacula. Movement paths were logged for 232 fish over many days.
A recaptured subset gave gut samples sorted into core and non-core germ groups. Fish living nearer seagrass meadows held richer non-core germ mixes, above all larger fish. Overall germ makeup did not differ clearly by size, territory, social ties, or sex, though core germs weakly tracked harem structure. Local habitat, more than social rank, seems to shape the gut mix.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Aina Pons, Eneko Aspillaga, Ignacio A Catalán, Tomeu Viver, Robert Arlinghaus, Martina Martorell‐Barceló, Margarida Barcelo‐Serra, Josep Alós |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 64775 |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |