I am especially happy to share first authorship with an amazing undergraduate mentee in the lab, Journey Prack! We also collaborated on the artwork featured as the graphical abstract to our paper!

We found surprising consistency in the bacterial taxa positively correlated with host fitness regardless of highly disparate life stages and inocula used in our experiments. We highlight Acetobacteraceae and Actinobacteriota, well studied group in insect-microbe symbiosis

We asked:
1) Do parental mosquitoes pass along a repeatable and beneficial community to offspring?
2) Can larvae adaptively shift the microbial community of their rearing environment?
3) Does prior conditioning of bacterial communities by conspecifics enhance fitness in recipient germ-free hosts?

While the pitcher plant system is a great model in which to explore this, we think that "external microbiome curation" may be an underappreciated modality by which hosts with horizontally-acquired and non-specific microbiota may still "select" better symbionts