Migratory animals live in a world of constant change. Animals undergo many physiological changes preparing themselves for the migration. Although this field has been extensively studied over the last decades, we know relatively little about the seasonal changes that occur in the microbial communities that these animals carry in their guts. Here we assessed the V4 region of the 16S rRNA high-throughput sequencing data as a proxy to estimate microbiome diversity of Tequila Bats from fecal pellets and evaluate how the natural process of migration shapes the microbiome composition, and diversity. We collected samples from individual bats at two localities in the Dry Forest biome (Chamela and Coquimatlán) and one site at the end point of the migration in the Sonoran Desert (Pinacate). We found that the gut microbiome of the Tequila bats is largely dominated by Firmicutes and Proteobacteria. Our data also provide insights on how microbiome diversity shifts at the same site in consecutive years. Our study has demonstrated that both locality and year-to-year variation contribute to shaping the composition, overall diversity, and the 'uniqueness' of the gut microbiome of migratory nectar-feeding female bats with localities from the dry forest biome looking more like each other when compared to the desert biome. In terms of beta diversity, our data show a stratified effect in which the samples locality was the strongest factor influencing the gut microbiome, but with significant variation between consecutive years at the same locality.

See the Viquez-R et al 2021 for more information.

DOI:10.1128/Spectrum.01525-21