Case reports of common vampire bats Desmodus rotundus (Chiroptera: Phyllostomidae: Desmodontinae) attacking wild exotic mammals in Argentina

Calfayan, Laura M.; Bonnot, Guido; Villafañe, Isabel E. Gómez

doi:10.31687/saremnms.19.0.05

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 9 publications

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“…The different types of methods used for the identification of common vampire bat prey include field observations (Catenazzi & Donnelly, 2008;Greenhall, 1988), camera traps (Calfayan et al, 2018;Galetti et al, 2016;Zortéa et al, 2018), precipitation tests to visualise antibody-antigen complexes (Greenhall, 1970), and stable isotope analysis (Catenazzi & Donnelly, 2008;Streicker & Allgeier, 2016;Voigt & Kelm, 2006). Field observations are challenging as bats are nocturnal (Tournayre et al, 2021), precipitation tests are labour intensive, and stable isotope analysis does not give species resolution (reviewed in (Carter et al, 2021)).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A two-step metagenomics approach for prey identification from the blood meals of common vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus)

Chua

Carøe

Crampton‐Platt

et al. 2021

Preprint

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The feeding behaviour of the sanguivorous common vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus) facilitates the transmission of pathogens that can impact both human and animal health. To formulate effective strategies in controlling the spread of diseases, there is a need to obtain information on which animals they feed on. One DNA-based approach, shotgun sequencing, can be used to obtain such information. Even though it is costly, shotgun sequencing can be used to simultaneously retrieve prey and vampire bat mitochondrial DNA for population studies within one round of sequencing. However, due to the challenges of analysing shotgun sequenced metagenomic data such as false negatives/positives and typically low proportion of reads mapped to diet items, shotgun sequencing has not been used for the identification of prey from common vampire bat blood meals. To overcome these challenges and generate longer mitochondrial contigs which could be useful for prey population studies, we shotgun sequenced common vampire bat blood meal samples (n=8) and utilised a two-step metagenomic approach based on combining existing bioinformatic workflows (alignment and de novo mtDNA assembly) to identify prey. Further, we validated our results to detections made through metabarcoding. We accurately identified the common vampire bats prey in seven out of eight samples without any false positives. We also generated prey mitochondrial contig lengths between 138bp to 3231bp (mean=985bp, SD=981bp). As we develop more computationally efficient bioinformatics pipelines and reduce sequencing costs, we can expect an uptake in metagenomics dietary studies in the near future.

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