Agriculture shapes the trophic niche of a bat preying on multiple pest arthropods across Europe: Evidence from DNA metabarcoding

Abstract

The interaction between agricultural production and wildlife can shape, and even condition, the functioning of both systems. In this study, we i) explored the degree to which a widespread European bat, namely the common bent-wing bat Miniopterus schreibersii, consumes crop-damaging insects at a continental scale, and ii) tested whether its dietary niche is shaped by the extension and type of agricultural fields. We employed a dual-primer DNA metabarcoding approach to characterize arthropod 16S and COI DNA sequences within bat faecal pellets collected across 16 Southern European localities, to first characterize the bat species' dietary niche, second measure the incidence of agricultural pests across their ranges and third assess whether geographical dietary variation responds to climatic, landscape diversity, agriculture type and vegetation productivity factors. We detected 12 arthropod orders, among which lepidopterans were predominant. We identified >200 species, 44 of which are known to cause agricultural damage. Pest species were detected at all but one sampling site and in 94% of the analysed samples. Furthermore, the dietary diversity of M. schreibersii exhibited a negative linear relation with the area of intensive agricultural fields, thus suggesting crops restrict the dietary niche of bats to prey taxa associated with agricultural production within their foraging range. Overall, our results imply that M. schreibersii might be a valuable asset for biological pest suppression in a variety of agricultural productions and highlight the dynamic interplay between wildlife and agricultural systems.

Table for five, please: Dietary partitioning in boreal bats

“…This suggests that the diets of our study species could be determined by the abundance and availability of insect prey instead of any particular predator‐specific characteristic. In fact, it has previously been reported that bat diet responds to local insect population fluctuations (Aizpurua et al, ; Clare, Barber, Sweeney, Hebert, & Fenton, ; Sedlock, Krüger, & Clare, ; Vesterinen et al, ). Razgour et al () reported temporal shifts in the proportional frequencies of Lepidoptera and Diptera prey of P. auritus .…”

Finding flies in the mushroom soup: Host specificity of fungus‐associated communities revisited with a novel molecular method

“…Following Aizpurua et al. (), Alberdi, Aizpurua, Gilbert, and Bohmann () and Kaunisto et al. (), we refrained from measuring the DNA concentration of individual libraries and instead pooled 2.5 μl of each indexed sample per sequencing run (i.e., each pool consisted of samples amplified with either COI or ITS+16S primers), then cleaned pools using dual SPRI purification to remove any possible artefacts or nontarget size amplicons (Wirta et al., ).…”

Promises and pitfalls of using high‐throughput sequencing for diet analysis

“…Geographic and temporal variation in trophic interactions is very common (e.g., Arrizabalaga‐Escudero et al, ; Clare, Barber, Sweeney, Hebert, & Fenton, ), thus studies that aim to generalize their results to be representative to a larger organismal group or explain global ecological processes need to account for such variation to avoid biased results. For example, when characterizing the dietary niche of a species, it is important to collect samples over a large geographic range, so as to avoid biases driven by local peculiarities (Aizpurua et al, ). In contrast, should a study wish to explore a predator's role in suppressing a prey species of particular local importance (e.g., pests of commercial crops), more localized studies may be required (e.g., Crisol‐Martínez, Moreno‐Moyano, Wormington, Brown, & Stanley, ).…”