Highly variable fidelity drives symbiont community composition in an obligate symbiosis

Abstract

Multipartite symbioses, which involve intimate interactions among three or more species, have evolved independently numerous times in convergent evolution, and enable functional complexity and ecological flexibility. How stability is maintained in such relationships remains, however, poorly understood, and can only be fully understood by integrating processes across both micro- and macroevolutionary scales. In this study, we bridge these scales by examining the symbiotic communities of gutless marine oligochaetes - annelid worms that have become obligately dependent on their bacterial partners for nutrition and waste removal over the past 150 million years. Using metagenomic sequencing of 231 individuals from 63 host species, collected across 17 marine environments worldwide, we reconstructed host and symbiont phylogenies to investigate the composition, specificity, and evolutionary history of their symbiotic communities from the strain to genus level. Our results show that each gutless oligochaete harbors up to 10 symbiont species drawn from a restricted pool of 33 marine bacterial genera. Community composition was strongly shaped by host species at 90% explanatory power, and much less by geography or environment. Symbiont communities were highly stable within host species but shifted rapidly at short macroevolutionary scales as host species diverged. Ancestral state reconstructions revealed that the primary symbiont, Candidatus Thiosymbion, was an early and persistent acquisition, while secondary symbionts were gained multiple times through convergent evolution, enhancing the diversity and metabolic flexibility of the symbiotic communities. By linking fine-scale microevolutionary dynamics with broader macroevolutionary patterns, our study reveals how gutless oligochaetes achieve both stability and flexibility in their symbiotic partnerships - enabling long-term host dependency while driving innovation and adaptation. This evolutionary trajectory may underpin the ecological success and diversification of gutless oligochaetes in marine sediments, and may help explain the repeated emergence and persistence of other multipartite associations.