I've been working with PhD student Priscilla Alpizar on some bat gut microbiome data she collected in Costa Rica, and the paper has just been published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution in their special issue on the impact of anthropogenic change on animal microbiomes (link to paper here: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2021.746783/full).
This was a fun paper to work on and it yielded interesting results. Whilst intensive agriculture is generally known to have negative effects on biodiversity, in this context the crop was banana, whose flowers provide a nectar food source for nectar-feeding bat species. Therefore, some nectar-feeding bats, including the Pallas's long-tongued bat studied by Pri, often forage in these intensive plantations. Is this a good thing? A bad thing? Are these plantations acting as ecological traps? It is conceivable that insecticides used in these monocultures have direct (chemical pollution) and indirect (reduce diet diversity and nutrition) effects on bat health, even though they are providing a nectar food source. It should be noted that whilst this species is largely nectar feeding, they are actually omnivorous and also feed on invertebrates.
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