Diet components associated with specific bacterial taxa shape overall gut community compositions in omnivorous African viverrids
Gut bacterial communities provide flexibility to hosts during dietary changes. Despite the increasing number of studies exploring the associations between broader dietary guilds of mammalian hosts and their gut bacteria, it is generally unclear how diversity and variability in consumed diets link to...
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| Published in: | Ecology and evolution Vol. 14; no. 7; pp. e11486 - n/a |
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , , , |
| Format: | Journal Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
England
John Wiley & Sons, Inc
01-07-2024
Wiley |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | Gut bacterial communities provide flexibility to hosts during dietary changes. Despite the increasing number of studies exploring the associations between broader dietary guilds of mammalian hosts and their gut bacteria, it is generally unclear how diversity and variability in consumed diets link to gut bacterial taxa in wild non‐primate mammals, particularly in omnivores. Here, we contribute to filling this gap by exploring consumed diets and gut bacterial community compositions with metabarcoding of faecal samples for two African mammals, Civettictis civetta and Genetta spp., from the family Viverridae. For each individual sample, we characterised bacterial communities and identified dietary taxa by sequencing vertebrate, invertebrate and plant markers. This led us to establish diet compositions that diverged from what has previously been found from visual identification methods. Specifically, while the two genera have been categorised into the same dietary guild, we detected more animal dietary items than plant items in C. civetta, while in Genetta spp., we observed the opposite. We further found that individuals with similar diets have similar gut bacterial communities within both genera. This association tended to be driven by specific links between dietary items and gut bacterial genera, rather than communities as a whole, implying diet‐driven selection for specific gut microbes in individual wild hosts. Our findings underline the importance of molecular tools for improving characterisations of omnivorous mammalian diets and highlight the opportunities for simultaneously disentangling links between diets and gut symbionts. Such insights can inform robustness and flexibility in host‐microbe symbioses to dietary change associated with seasonal and habitat changes.
This study employs DNA metabarcoding on faecal samples to analyse the diets and gut bacterial communities of two African mammals within the order Carnivora: Civettictis civetta and Genetta spp. We demonstrate a significantly higher number of diet taxa than previous morphological studies, offering deeper insights into the feeding behaviours of these mammals. Furthermore, we show positive associations between consumed diets and gut microbiome compositions that overall tend to be driven by specific correlations between gut bacterial taxa and specific dietary items, underlining how diet acts as a driver of individual variation in wild mammalian gut microbiomes. |
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| Bibliography: | Malou B. Storm and Emilia M. R. Arfaoui contributed equally to this work. ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 |
| ISSN: | 2045-7758 2045-7758 |
| DOI: | 10.1002/ece3.11486 |