Long-lived house crickets had distinct gut microbe communities
A laboratory comparison linked more than 20 years of selection for delayed reproduction and longer life to differences in house crickets’ gut microbes.
Our read
Mechanisms- Studied:
- Experiments in house crickets, against wild-type house crickets
- What changed:
- Long-lived house crickets had different gut microbe communities than wild-type crickets, with more Gammaproteobacteria and lactic acid bacteria
- The catch:
- Longer lifespan could change gut microbes rather than result from them
- In the record:
- One of 8 papers on artificial selection on record: none yet with results in people, 5 in animals.
- Why it’s aging research:
- It measures how long life or healthy life lasts.
Editor of record: Boris Djordjevic · AgingResearch.News
In an experiment in house crickets (Acheta domesticus), researchers compared two strains kept under the same laboratory conditions. One had undergone selection for delayed reproduction and longer lifespan for more than 20 years, spanning 64 generations.
The selected strain lived longer and had larger bodies. Food intake and energy absorption did not fall, and DNA damage did not increase. The authors said the physiological results supported the idea that reduced metabolism was not the main reason for longer life. The strains differed in their gut microbe communities, but not in overall microbial richness—the number of kinds of microbes present. The authors suggested these distinct communities may be part of the long-lived strain’s characteristics.
Why it matters
How gut microbes contribute to the evolution of longer life remains poorly understood. The authors highlighted microbial variation as potentially important during the evolution of lifespan and reproductive timing in insects.
Caveats
The strain comparison left the causal relationship between gut microbe differences and longer lifespan unresolved. The findings came from laboratory house crickets, not people.
- Artificial selection
- DNA damage response
- Microbiome composition
- DNA damage
- Antioxidant capacity
- A. domesticus
The paper
University of Silesia in Katowice
Scientific Reports, Jun 27, 2026, Open access
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