Gut microbial characterization of Melon-Headed Whales (Peponocephala electra) stranded in China

Despite gut microbes are regarded as the important component of many mammals and play a very important role, yet there is a paucity of knowledge on marine mammalian gut microbes, which may be due to sampling difficulties. Moreover, there are no reports on the gut microbes of melon-headed whales. In this study, we collected 8 fecal samples from 8 different stranded melon-headed whales in China, using high-throughput sequencing technology, we demonstrated that the main taxa of melon-headed whale gut microbes are Cetobacterium, Bacteroides, Clostridium sensu stricto, Enterococcus and Shewanella. Meanwhile, by predicting the functions of the gut microbial community through PICRUSt2, we found that although there were differences in the composition of the gut microbial community in each sample, the predicted functional profiles were similar. Furthermore, molecular ecological network analysis (MENA) demonstrated that two modules constitute the gut microbial community network of melon-headed whales. Module 1 is mainly composed of Bacteroides, while the main components of Module 2 were Cetobacterium and Enterococcus, and the network keystone genera were Corynebacterium, Alcaligenes, Acinetobacter, and Flavobacterium. Our study provides fundamental gut microbial community data for understanding the melon-headed whales.