DNA extracted from ascidian tunic preserved in 100% ethanol using DNeasy Blood & Tissue Extraction Kit (Qiagen); submitted for library prep and sequencing at GGBF (http://dna.uga.edu) where 16S rRNA amplicon libraries were generated with V4 region primers (Parada et al. 2016; Apprill et al. 2015), barcoded and pooled prior to sequencing