Viromes of arthropod parasites and their hosts: The case of bats and bat ectoparasites

Blood feeding ectoparasites of bats have been found to contain insect-specific and vertebrate-infecting viruses of agricultural and medical importance. While it is plausible that some of these are of bat origin, those would be sourced either from the bat exterior or their blood meal. Bats, in addition to their regular diets, consume numerous ectoparasites during grooming. All microbes on and in the ectoparasites would then be introduced into the bat gut upon ingestion of the ectoparasites. To investigate the potential impact of bat ectoparasite viromes on the gut viral microbiome of bats, we compared virus sequences from bats and their blood feeding ectoparasites collected from Yunnan Province, China. Although all the co-occurring viruses were bacteriophages, we observed that bats contained a larger set of viruses than their ectoparasites, and that the set of predicted viruses present in the bats were more diverse than those present in bat ectoparasites. Our analysis suggests that despite a heavy influx of ectoparasites into the digestive tract of bats through consumption, there are only few co-occurring/shared viruses between bats and their ectoparasites, and that these ectoparasites may not be a major driver of bat virome diversity. Our findings provide necessary preliminary data for the evaluation of bat ectoparasites as a potential source of bat infecting viruses.