Data and R code for "Social convergence of gut microbiomes in vampire bats"

The ‘social microbiome’ can fundamentally shape the costs and benefits of group-living, but understanding social transmission of microbes in free-living animals is challenging due to confounding effects of kinship and shared environments (e.g. highly associated individuals often share the same spaces, food, and water). Here, we report evidence for convergence towards a social microbiome among introduced common vampire bats, <i>Desmodus rotundus</i>, a highly social species in which adults feed only on blood, and engage in both mouth-to-body allogrooming and mouth-to-mouth regurgitated food sharing. Shotgun sequencing of samples from 6 zoos in the USA, 15 wild-caught bats from a colony in Belize, and 32 bats from three colonies in Panama showed that fecal microbiomes were more similar within than between colonies. To assess microbial transmission, we then created an experimentally merged group of 31 bats captured from three distant sites and housed these bats together for four months. In this merged colony, we found evidence that gut microbiome similarity was increased by both clustering and oral contact, leading to microbiome convergence among introduced bats. Our findings demonstrate that social interactions shape microbiome similarity even when controlling for past social history, kinship, environment, and diet.