Fig. 1.

Comparison of the bowhead whale microbiome and lipidome across the gastrointestinal (GI) tract of bowhead whales. a Illustration of a bowhead whale feeding on zooplankton (inset: copepod and krill) and the nine GI areas from which samples of GI contents were collected. Nonmetric multidimensional scaling (nMDS) comparisons of Bray–Curtis dissimilarities of b microbial communities based on the 361 minimum entropy decomposition nodes [23] (MED nodes) (n = 121) and c the 546 lipids (n = 106). For both figures, dispersion ellipse centroids are defined by the mean dissimilarities for each anatomical location and the ellipse shapes are defined by the covariances. d Comparison of MDS1 scaling from the paired microbiome and lipidome samples across the GI tract (n = 105)