Over the past decade, advances in high-throughput sequencing of DNA extracted from bat guano have allowed researchers to gain new insight into the foraging ecology of bats. Recent work has provided new perspectives on basic biological questions, including inter-/intraspecific competition and seasonal differences in prey selection, as well as applied topics such as the potential importance of bat predation for insect pest management. Here we expand on this emerging knowledge base with an analysis of big brown bat (Eptesicus fuscus) and little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus) guano collected from six maternity colonies across a diverse New Jersey, USA landscape over a 26-week period (April – October) in 2017. We use metabarcoding techniques to catalog the dietary niche of these two species and identify seasonal patterns in prey selection. We measured the frequency of occurrence of agricultural pests within guano samples, and we assessed whether landcover metrics influenced the type of arthropods present in guano.
Results/Conclusions
We identified 2,815 amplicon sequence variants (ASVs), corresponding with 552 species from 151 arthropod families. The most common taxa included Lepidoptera (moths), Coleoptera (beetles), and Diptera (flies), as well as the primarily aquatic Megaloptera, Ephemeroptera, and Trichoptera. Over 25% of prey items identified are known agricultural (e.g. brown marmorated stink bug, tarnished plant bug) and human (e.g. mosquitos) pests. Coleopterns were consumed consistently across the study period, while Dipterans, Lepidopterans and Ephemeroptera consumed predominantly in late summer. Overall, our analyses suggest that E. fuscus and M. lucifugus can play a measurable role in agricultural integrated pest management.