Fig. 5

The microbial community composition of the offspring within nests that were paired in the cross-fostering experiment. Each pair of nests (numbers above graphs) is shown at the initial time point before the cross-fostering experiment when the nestlings were young (left) and after cross-fostering when the nestlings were ~ 3 weeks older (right). Nestlings are denoted by their initial nest and experimental category, with Nest 1 control = orange circles, Nest 1 cross-fostered = red triangles, Nest 2 control = black circles, Nest 2 cross-fostered = blue triangles. The number of points between the plots for young and old nestlings typically differs because of nestling mortality, but sometimes points are missing due to lack of data for an individual at a particular time point. No plots are given for old nestlings in plots I and J, because of nestling mortality. The Jaccard dissimilarity for each pair of nests at each time point was separately calculated and plotted with multidimensional scaling, with the percentage of variation explained by each axis given in brackets