Fig. 8

Microbial dissimilarity of zebra finch juveniles reared by unrelated conspecifics with their genetic and foster relatives. Violin plots with embedded box plots comparing the distribution of pairwise BC dissimilarities between zebra finch juveniles reared by unrelated conspecifics and their genetic relatives (genetic mother, father and siblings) and foster relatives (foster mother, father and siblings) at 5, 10 and 35 dph. Significance differences between foster and genetic relatives were determined based on Wilcoxon rank-sum tests. The significance of the change in distance over time in the foster and genetic groups was determined by the Kruskal–Wallis rank-sum test followed by the post hoc Dunn’s test. Significance is highlighted for p values ≤ 0.05 (*), p ≤ 0.01 (**) and p ≤ 0.001 (***) after Bonferroni correction