Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics of Wildlife and Marine Holobionts under Environmental Change

The holobiont concept — the recognition of animals and their associated microbial communities as integrated functional and evolutionary units — has reshaped how biologists understand symbiosis, adaptation, and resilience in wild populations. Across wildlife and marine systems, host-microbe partnerships are increasingly viewed as the product of long evolutionary histories of reciprocal selection, co-adaptation, and phylosymbiosis, in which microbial communities both shape and are shaped by host biology. Yet much of the holobiont literature remains descriptive, with limited mechanistic insight into how these partnerships are assembled, transmitted, and reshaped by the ecological and evolutionary pressures that wild animals face.As climate change, habitat loss, pollution, and emerging pathogens intensify across terrestrial and marine ecosystems, there is an urgent need to move from cataloguing microbial diversity to understanding the coevolutionary, functional, and comparative processes that link host-associated microbiomes to organismal fitness, population persistence, and ecosystem function. This is particularly true for wildlife and marine animals, where holobiont research lags far behind agricultural and biomedical systems, despite the central role these partnerships play in conservation, animal health, and the resilience of biodiversity under global change.This Research Topic brings together studies that advance a mechanistic, eco-evolutionary understanding of host-microbe coevolution and holobiont function in wild terrestrial and marine animals facing environmental stress. We welcome original research, reviews, hypothesis and theory papers, and methodological contributions on:• Host-microbe coevolution, phylosymbiosis, and the deep history of symbiotic partnerships• Functional and comparative metagenomics of wildlife and marine animal microbiomes• Reciprocal selection, co-adaptation, and microbial contributions to host evolutionary trajectories• Microbiome-mediated resilience, adaptation, and health under climate, pollution, and disease pressure• Symbiont acquisition, vertical and horizontal transmission, and holobiont assembly across host generations• Microbial contributions to host immunity, metabolism, behaviour, and reproduction in wild populations• Disruption and restoration of coevolved holobiont function under environmental change• Conservation, captive breeding, and rewilding applications of holobiont and coevolutionary science• Methodological advances in functional, multi-omics, and experimental holobiont researchBy integrating coevolutionary theory with functional and ecological approaches, this collection aims to consolidate the eco-evolutionary foundations of holobiont biology in wildlife and marine systems, and to inform the next generation of conservation, animal health, and biodiversity management strategies in a changing world. Topic editors: Enas Al-khlifeh, Mais Ahed Sweiss Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/82438/eco-evolutionary-dynamics-of-wildlife-and-marine-holobionts-under-environmental-change