The digestive microbiota plays a decisive role in shaping and preserving health throughout life. Rabbit younglings are born with a sterile digestive tract but then it gets progressively colonised by the microbiota of the nursing mother, by entering in contact with or ingesting the maternal droppings present in the nest. Here we posit that (i) offspring survival and (ii) lifespan of female rabbits are linked to how diverse their microbiota are. To test the hypothesis that maternal microbiota evolves in females having had different levels of offspring survival in their lifetime, we obtained 216 hard faecal samples from 75 female rabbits at ages 19.6, 31.6, 62.6 and 77.6 weeks. The annual mean offspring survival (MOS) at 64 days was calculated for each female then crossed against three alpha-diversity indexes (operational taxonomic units (OTUs), inverse Simpson index and Shannon index). Age was also analysed against these three parameters. The alpha-diversity indexes of the female faecal microbiota did not correlate with MOS, but they did decrease with age (e.g. from 712 OTUs at age 19.6 weeks to 444 OTUs at 77.6 weeks; P < 0.05). The age effect was also found in beta-diversity non-metric multidimensional scaling plots using the Bray–Curtis dissimilarity index and the unweighted UniFrac index but not for MOS. The ability of the microbiota composition from the faecal samples of young females (19.6 weeks old) to predict their lifespan was also evaluated. After subdividing the initial population into two classes (females that weaned a maximum of three litters and females living longer), we found no clear distinction between these two classes. To our knowledge, this is the first long-term study to characterise the gut microbiota of adult female rabbits through their reproductive life, thus laying foundations for using the gut microbiota data and its influence in studies on adult rabbits.

消化微生物群在塑造和保持一生的健康中起着决定性的作用。兔子的幼崽出生时具有无菌的消化道，但是通过接触或摄入巢中的母体粪便，它逐渐被哺乳母亲的微生物群定殖。在这里，我们认为（i）雌性兔子的后代存活率和（ii）寿命与它们的微生物群的多样性有关。为了检验这一假设，即雌性微生物群在其一生中具有不同水平的后代存活的雌性中进化，我们从75只雌性兔子中分别获得了216个硬粪便样品，分别在19.6、31.6、62.6和77.6周龄。年平均后代​​存活率（MOS）计算出每位女性在64天时的水平，然后将其与三个alpha多样性指数（业务分类单位（OTU s），辛普森指数倒数和香农指数）进行比较。还针对这三个参数分析了年龄。女性粪便微生物群的α多样性指数与MOS无关，但随着年龄的增长而降低（例如，从19.6周龄的712 OTU降至77.6周的444 OTU；P<0.05）。在使用Bray-Curtis不相似指数和未加权UniFrac指数的β多样性非度量多维比例尺绘图中也发现了年龄效应，但对于MOS却没有。还评估了年轻女性（19.6周龄）粪便样本中微生物群组成预测其寿命的能力。将初始种群分为两类（女性最多断奶三窝，而女性寿命更长），这两个类别之间没有明显的区别。据我们所知，这是第一项通过成年雌性兔子的生殖寿命表征其肠道菌群的长期研究，从而为利用肠道菌群数据及其对成年兔子的影响奠定了基础。