Fig. 2

Beta diversity analysis shows distinct microbial communities in wild khulans, waterholes, and captive khulans. (A) Principal Coordinates Analysis (PCoA) plots comparing the microbial beta diversity of wild and captive khulans, water and sediments from waterholes. (B) Pairwise comparison of intersample Bray-Curtis (BC) dissimilarity distances shows no difference between wild and captive khulan to water or sediment microbial communities. Every dot represents the distance between a pair of samples. (C) Mean and the 95% confidence interval of a post-hoc Tukey’s HSD test performed on BC dissimilarity distances shows highly significant differences between wild khulan microbiomes, water and sediment microbiomes. (D) The overall comparison of multivariate homogeneity of sample type dispersions for BC dissimilarity distances between samples relative to the centroid shows a higher significant difference between wild khulan microbiomes to waterhole-derived samples. (E) PCoA from waterhole-derived samples confirms that 14% of the variation in PCoA 1 and the observed clustering in microbial composition varies significantly based on the sample origin. (F) Clustering of khulan microbiomes in the PCoA significantly depend on living condition, either wild or captive. Significance codes: ‘****’ 0.0001, ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05.