DNA metabarcoding and spatial modelling link diet diversification with distribution homogeneity in European bats

Antton Alberdi,Hugo Rebelo,Anton Vlaschenko,Orly Razgour,Vida Zrnčić,Ostaizka Aizpurua,Eñaut Izagirre,M Thomas P Gilbert,Danilo Russo,Joxerra Aihartza,Ivana Budinski,Inazio Garin,Roberto Novella-Fernandez,Carlos Ibáñez,Violeta Zhelyazkova

doi:10.1038/s41467-020-14961-2

Abstract

Inferences of the interactions between species’ ecological niches and spatial distribution have been historically based on simple metrics such as low-resolution dietary breadth and range size, which might have impeded the identification of meaningful links between niche features and spatial patterns. We analysed the relationship between dietary niche breadth and spatial distribution features of European bats, by combining continent-wide DNA metabarcoding of faecal samples with species distribution modelling. Our results show that while range size is not correlated with dietary features of bats, the homogeneity of the spatial distribution of species exhibits a strong correlation with dietary breadth. We also found that dietary breadth is correlated with bats’ hunting flexibility. However, these two patterns only stand when the phylogenetic relations between prey are accounted for when measuring dietary breadth. Our results suggest that the capacity to exploit different prey types enables species to thrive in more distinct environments and therefore exhibit more homogeneous distributions within their ranges.

Highlights

Inferences of the interactions between species’ ecological niches and spatial distribution have been historically based on simple metrics such as low-resolution dietary breadth and range size, which might have impeded the identification of meaningful links between niche features and spatial patterns
We detected over 3000 different prey taxa belonging to 29 arthropod orders (Fig. 1a), though the diet of European bats was dominated by Lepidoptera and Diptera (Fig. 1b)
Our results complement the existing broad-scale molecular dietary data of Miniopterus schreibersii[17], and provide geographically widespread molecular insights into the dietary ecology of Myotis daubentonii, Myotis myotis, Myotis emarginatus, Myotis capaccinii, Rhinolophus euryale and Rhinolophus ferrumequinum, which to our knowledge had only been studied at local scales previously[16,22,23,24,25]

Summary

Introduction

Inferences of the interactions between species’ ecological niches and spatial distribution have been historically based on simple metrics such as low-resolution dietary breadth and range size, which might have impeded the identification of meaningful links between niche features and spatial patterns. Different domains of the ecological niche, such as climatic tolerance, habitat breadth and dietary breadth, have been shown to be positively associated with species’ geographical range sizes[3], which is the feature historically employed to characterise the spatial distribution of species[2]. The lack of a consistent link between dietary niche breadth and range size in vertebrates could be due to their broader dietary niche breadth in comparison to that of the more thoroughly studied phytophagous arthropods, which typically exhibit a larger degree of resource specialisation[7,8]. Vertebrates often exhibit mismatches between different niche components; they can be generalists for dietary resources, but specialists for some other resources, such as roosts[9,10] These discrepancies could lead to discordance between the given Eltonian features and range size. SDMs predict how presence probability is distributed across the geographic range of a species, enabling the estimation of homogeneity of the spatial distribution

Methods

Results

Conclusion