Fig. 1

Analysis of the cecal microbiome. Indicators of α-diversity (effective richness, shannon effective, simpson effective, evenness) of the cecal bacterial community (A), visualization of the difference in β-diversity of cecal bacterial community between groups by non-metric multidimension distance scaling plot (B), and distribution of cecal bacteria at different taxonomic levels (phylum, order, family) (C) of broilers fed diets with either 0 (HI-0), 2.5% (HI-2.5) or 5.0% (HI-5.0) Hermetia illucens (HI) larvae fat for 35 d. A: Box and whisker plots for n = 12–14 broilers/group; C: Data are means for n = 12–14 broilers/group. ^a,bMeans without a common letter differ across the groups, P < 0.05