Specific gut bacterial responses to natural diets of tropical birds

Abstract

The composition of gut bacterial communities is strongly influenced by the host diet in many animal taxa. For birds, the effect of diet on the microbiomes has been documented through diet manipulation studies. However, for wild birds, most studies have drawn on literature-based information to decipher the dietary effects, thereby, overlooking individual variation in dietary intake. Here we examine how naturally consumed diets influence the composition of the crop and cloacal microbiomes of twenty-one tropical bird species, using visual and metabarcoding-based identification of consumed diets and bacterial 16S rRNA microbiome sequencing. We show that diet intakes vary markedly between individuals of the same species and that literature-based dietary guilds grossly underestimate intraspecific diet variability. Furthermore, despite an effect of literature-based dietary guild assignment of host taxa, the composition of natural diets does not align with crop and cloacal microbiome similarity. However, host-taxon specific gut bacterial lineages are positively correlated with specific diet items, indicating that certain microbes associate with different diet components in specific avian hosts. Consequently, microbiome composition is not congruent with the overall consumed diet composition of species, but specific components of a consumed diet lead to host-specific effects on gut bacterial taxa.