Molecular Diet Analysis of Neotropical Bats Based on Fecal DNA Metabarcoding

Bat communities in the Neotropics are some of the most speciose assemblages of mammals on Earth, with regions supporting more than 100 sympatric species with diverse feeding ecologies. Because bats are small, nocturnal, and volant, it is difficult to directly observe their feeding habits, which has resulted in their classification into broadly defined dietary guilds (e.g. insectivores, carnivores, frugivores). Apart from these broad guilds, we lack detailed dietary information for many species and therefore have only a limited understanding of interaction networks linking bats and their diet items. In this study, we used DNA metabarcoding of plants, arthropods, and vertebrates to investigate the diets of 25 bat species from the tropical dry forests of Lamanai, Belize. Our results report some of the first genus or species-level detection of diet items for a subset of the focal bat taxa, adding rich and novel natural history information to the field of bat ecology. This study represents a comprehensive first effort to apply metabarcoding to bat diets at Lamanai and provides a useful methodological framework for future studies testing hypotheses about coexistence and niche differentiation in the context of modern high-throughput molecular data.