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The ‘social microbiome’ can fundamentally shape the costs and benefits of group-living, but understanding social transmission of microbes in free-living animals is challenging due to confounding effects of kinship and shared environments (e.g. highly associated individuals often share the same spaces, food and water). Here, we report evidence for convergence towards a social microbiome among introduced common vampire bats, Desmodus rotundus , a highly social species in which adults feed only on blood, and engage in both mouth-to-body allogrooming and mouth-to-mouth regurgitated food sharing. Shotgun sequencing of samples from six zoos in the USA, 15 wild-caught bats from a colony in Belize and 31 bats from three colonies in Panama showed that faecal microbiomes were more similar within colonies than between colonies. To assess microbial transmission, we created an experimentally merged group of the Panama bats from the three distant sites by housing these bats together for four months. In this merged colony, we found evidence that dyadic gut microbiome similarity increased with both clustering and oral contact, leading to microbiome convergence among introduced bats. Our findings demonstrate that social interactions shape microbiome similarity even when controlling for past social history, kinship, environment and diet.
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Bats in Habitats, Bats as Habitats: An integrative ecological framework for understanding synergistic interactions across levels of community organization
Global biodiversity and ecosystem function are the result of complex networks of interactions and feedbacks between animals and their environments, which in turn are affected by the interactions and feedbacks between animals and the organisms they host. Understanding these complex networks, including the main drivers of and responses to ecological and environmental changes and their global implications, requires adopting a systems-based perspective. We advocate for this approach by characterizing a framework centered around bats, a globally-distributed mammalian order, and their dual roles as both inhabitants of ecosystems and as habitats themselves. Like other organisms, bats interact with habitats by providing ecosystem services that impact the survival and distribution of other species, and may be affected by such factors as land use change, climate change, fluctuations in food availability, and hunting pressure. Habitat conditions (e.g. food availability, temperature, etc.) can affect the physiological condition of individuals, which in turn can affect the prevalence and/or virulence of hosted organisms and potential pathogens (e.g. ectoparasites, bacteria, viruses, fungi, and protozoa). In addition, the interactions among individuals (e.g. co-roosting, migration, etc.) influence the habitat connectivity for their hosted organisms (e.g. opportunities for dispersal). Bats have a unique relationship with infectious disease, both biological and cultural. With this in mind, when applied to bats this framework has special importance to how we understand and apply the One Health concept, whereby healthy natural environments foster both human and animal health, which in turn also promotes healthy environments. By leveraging a hierarchical approach among these different levels of biological organization, we can arrive at a clearer picture of the specific threats facing bats—as well as the risk of pathogen spillover to humans and other domesticated and wild animals generated by disrupting this delicate balance—and identify possible measures to mitigate adverse impacts. Thus, to understand these complex interactions and their implications for conservation, ecosystem health, and human health, we need a new ecological framework that recognizes that changes in habitats not only affect macrofauna and the ecosystem services they provide, but also have the potential to cascade through the diversity and evolution of the organisms they host. This review provides a case study for the application of this framework, which is extensible to other organisms with their own unique relationships with habitats and as habitats.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2020577
- PAR ID:
- 10663157
- Author(s) / Creator(s):
- ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; more »
- Publisher / Repository:
- EcoEvoRxiv
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript
- Posted Content:
- https://doi.org/10.32942/X2RW59
