Characterizing larval breeding sites: bacterial community
composition
In La Lopé, peridomestic larval breeding sites had a higher Shannon
index than forest sites at the species, genus, and family level (Figure
S4, Table S4). Other pairwise comparisons were not significant. In
Rabai, Shannon index was comparable between all larval breeding site
groups (Figure S5, Table S5). Ae. aegypti present sites have
lower alpha diversity than Ae. aegypti absent sites at the
bacterial family level, but only when we ignored habitats.
NMDS analysis suggested that forest and village (including peridomestic
and domestic) larval breeding sites had a very different bacterial
community in both La Lopé (Figure 2g) and Rabai (Figure 2h) at the ASV
level. The forest-village divergence was less evident at higher
taxonomic levels for the La Lopé larval breeding sites (Figure S6),
while Rabai samples retained the difference between forest and village
at all four taxonomic levels (Figure S7). Within each habitat, larval
breeding sites with Ae. aegypti present and absent shared similar
bacterial community composition in both La Lopé and Rabai.
When examining the most abundant bacterial families, we observed
considerable variation among samples (Figure S8). Most larval breeding
sites contained multiple families with no clear dominance. In La Lopé,Microbacteriaceae , Flavobacteriaceae , andBurkholderiaceae showed higher abundance in forest breeding
sites, while Oxalobacteraceae and Sphingobacteriaceae were
more abundant in peridomestic sites (Figure S8a, Table S6). In Rabai,Moraxellaceae had an apparent dominance in domestic sites, but
its abundance was not significantly different between habitats.DESeq2 found a higher abundance of Enterobacteriaceae ,Xanthomonadaceae , Pseudomonadaceae , andPlanococcaceae in forest larval breeding sites than domestic and
peridomestic sites (Figure S8b, Table S7). A full list of bacterial
families that showed differential abundance between habitats are in
Table S6 and S7 in the Appendix.
Lastly, NMDS analysis found that temporal samples collected from the
same larval breeding sites did vary in their bacterial community
composition, but the temporal changes did not exceed the variations
observed within each habitat (Figure S9). That is, temporal samples from
the forest clustered with the rest of forest sites instead of samples
from the village, and vice versa. This result suggests that the strong
divergence in bacterial communities between habitat was temporally
stable.