Food for everyone: Differential feeding habits of cryptic bat species inferred from DNA metabarcoding

Abstract

Ecological theory postulates that niches of co-occurring species must differ along some ecological dimensions in order to allow their stable coexistence. Yet, many biological systems challenge this competitive exclusion principle. Insectivorous bats from the Northern Hemisphere typically form local assemblages of multiple species sharing highly similar functional traits and pertaining to identical feeding guilds. Although their trophic niche can be accessed with unprecedented details using genetic identification of prey, the underlying mechanisms of resource partitioning remain vastly unexplored. Here, we studied the differential diet of three closely-related bat species of the genus Plecotus in sympatry and throughout their entire breeding season using DNA metabarcoding. Even at such a small geographic scale, we identified strong seasonal and spatial variation of their diet composition at both intra- and interspecific levels. Indeed, while the different bats fed on a distinct array of prey during spring, they showed higher trophic niche overlap during summer and fall, when all three species switched their hunting behaviour to feed on few temporarily abundant moths. By recovering 19 ecological traits for over 600 prey species, we further inferred that each bat species used different feeding grounds and hunting techniques, suggesting that niche partitioning was primarily habitat-driven. The two most-closely related bat species exhibited very distinct foraging habitat preferences, while the third, more distantly-related species was more generalist. These results highlight the need of temporally comprehensive samples to fully understand species coexistence, and that valuable information can be derived from the taxonomic identity of prey obtained by metabarcoding approaches.