The microbiome of New World vultures

Abstract

Vultures are scavengers that fill a key ecosystem niche, in which they have evolved a remarkable tolerance to bacterial toxins in decaying meat. Here we report the first deep metagenomic analysis of the vulture microbiome. Through face and gut comparisons of 50 vultures representing two species, we demonstrate a remarkably conserved low diversity of gut microbial flora. The gut samples contained an average of 76 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) per specimen, compared with 528 OTUs on the facial skin. Clostridia and Fusobacteria, widely pathogenic to other vertebrates, dominate the vulture's gut microbiota. We reveal a likely faecal-oral-gut route for their origin. DNA of prey species detectable on facial swabs was completely degraded in the gut samples from most vultures, suggesting that the gastrointestinal tracts of vultures are extremely selective. Our findings show a strong adaption of vultures and their bacteria to their food source, exemplifying a specialized host-microbial alliance.

Food storage in a changing world: implications of climate change for food-caching species

“…Both species were found to have low pH in their digestive systems that destroyed most bacterial species before they could reach the hindgut. Additionally, the intestinal microbiome of both species had a high prevalence of both Clostridia and Fusobacteria [136], which are commonly found on carrion. Their abundance in the hindgut likely benefits vultures by further breaking down carrion, allowing for the more complete digestion of food [136].…”

“…Additionally, the intestinal microbiome of both species had a high prevalence of both Clostridia and Fusobacteria [136], which are commonly found on carrion. Their abundance in the hindgut likely benefits vultures by further breaking down carrion, allowing for the more complete digestion of food [136]. Both Clostridia and Fusobacteria have been demonstrated to cause a variety of negative effects in both wildlife and humans [53,61,80].…”

“…Recently, Roggenbuck et al [136] characterized a variety of adaptations in the digestive tracts of two New World vultures, Coragyps aratus and Cathartes aura. Both species were found to have low pH in their digestive systems that destroyed most bacterial species before they could reach the hindgut.…”

Role of Cyclonic Storm as Natural Disaster and other Factors on Vulture Mortality in India

“…Such factors are already covered in a recently published review article by Paital et al [29]. The authors made a perspective that hunting [31], pollution [30,[32][33][34], food scarcity and cannibalism [24,33,34], ingestion of contaminated food and food poisoning [35][36][37][38][39][40][41], multiple physiological disorders including nutritional problems [14,42], lack of proper nesting and resting places [8], genotoxic factors [43,44], problems related to breeding [24,45], electrocution and air traffic [38,46,47] epidemic and endemic diseases [38,[48][49][50][51], pathological susceptibility [22,41,48,[52][53][54] etc. may be contributing factors for vulture mortality.…”

The roles of diet, speciation and extinction on the diversification of birds, and on the assembly of frugivory networks

“…vultures) that feed preferentially on one particular food type to omnivores such as the medium-sized, common raven Corvus corax (family Corvidae) which have a generalized diet by feeding on multiple food items, such as insects, fruits, seeds, vertebrates and carrion (Kissling et al, 2012a). Such variation in the degree of diet specialization is probably related to different physiological and anatomical adaptations required to deal with different food items (O'Donnell et al, 2012, Abrahamczyk andKessler, 2014;Roggenbuck et al, 2014). For example, some nectarivorous and frugivorous species show specific preferences for different sugar contents related to enzyme activity and absorption rates (Martínez del Rio et al, 1992) which might eventually affect their food preference and hence their degree of specificity.…”