Ingala Melissa R, Simmons Nancy B, Wultsch Claudia, Krampis Konstantinos, Provost Kaiya L, Perkins Susan L
Division of Mammals Department of Vertebrate Zoology National Museum of Natural History Smithsonian Institution Washington DC USA.
Richard Gilder Graduate School The American Museum of Natural History New York NY USA.
Ecol Evol. 2021 May 2;11(12):7474-7491. doi: 10.1002/ece3.7579. eCollection 2021 Jun.
Bat communities in the Neotropics are some of the most speciose assemblages of mammals on Earth, with regions supporting more than 100 sympatric species with diverse feeding ecologies. Because bats are small, nocturnal, and volant, it is difficult to directly observe their feeding habits, which has resulted in their classification into broadly defined dietary guilds (e.g., insectivores, carnivores, and frugivores). Apart from these broad guilds, we lack detailed dietary information for many species and therefore have only a limited understanding of interaction networks linking bats and their diet items. In this study, we used DNA metabarcoding of plants, arthropods, and vertebrates to investigate the diets of 25 bat species from the tropical dry forests of Lamanai, Belize. Our results report some of the first detection of diet items for the focal bat taxa, adding rich and novel natural history information to the field of bat ecology. This study represents a comprehensive first effort to apply DNA metabarcoding to bat diets at Lamanai and provides a useful methodological framework for future studies testing hypotheses about coexistence and niche differentiation in the context of modern high-throughput molecular data.
新热带界的蝙蝠群落是地球上哺乳动物中物种最为丰富的群体之一，有些地区有100多种同域分布的物种，它们具有多样的觅食生态。由于蝙蝠体型小、夜行且能飞行，很难直接观察它们的觅食习性，这导致它们被归类为宽泛定义的食性类群（如食虫动物、食肉动物和食果动物）。除了这些宽泛的类群外，我们缺乏许多物种的详细食性信息，因此对连接蝙蝠及其食物的相互作用网络了解有限。在本研究中，我们利用植物、节肢动物和脊椎动物的DNA宏条形码技术，调查了伯利兹拉马奈热带干燥森林中25种蝙蝠的食性。我们的结果首次报告了一些目标蝙蝠类群的食物种类，为蝙蝠生态学领域增添了丰富而新颖的自然史信息。本研究是在拉马奈将DNA宏条形码技术应用于蝙蝠食性研究的首次全面尝试，并为未来在现代高通量分子数据背景下检验共存和生态位分化假说的研究提供了有用的方法框架。
