Statements & Declarations
Funding: This work was partially funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through the COMPETE program and by National Funds through FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology (project PTDC/BIA-MIC/27995/2017 POCI01-0145- FEDER-027995); RX was supported by FCT under the Programa Operacional Potencial Humano – Quadro de Referência Estratégico Nacional funds from the European Social Fund and Portuguese Ministério da Educação e Ciência (2020.00854.CEECIND/CP1601/CT0001), AP was supported by FCT (SFRH/BD/144928/2019) .
Competing Interests: The authors have no competing interests.
Author Contributions: All authors contributed to the writing of the manuscript; DV collected samples, performed laboratory work and analyzed the data; DJH conceived the work, collected samples and contributed with funding; ID-M collected samples; AP performed laboratory work; RX conceived the work, supervised data analysis and contributed with funding.
Data Availability: Data will be deposited in NCBI’s Short Read Archive (SRA) upon acceptance.
Ethics approval: Experimental protocols and research were approved by the Portuguese Institute for Conservation of Nature and Forests (ICNF) (License 703/2021/CAPT).
Table 1 - Results from the pairwise PERMANOVA testing the effect of species and sex in gut microbial beta-diversity (R2 and respective adjusted p-values). Significant results are depicted in bold.