Turkey Vultures Evolved Extreme Gut to Cope with Their Disgusting Diet

The human gut is remarkable when it comes to packing away turkey and stuffing for Thanksgiving. But have you ever wondered how other animals manage to survive on food that's inedible to others? Vultures, for example, can live on a diet of carrion that would at least lead to severe food-poisoning and more likely kill most other animals. Now, scientists have discovered how vultures manage to survive their diet.

Vultures eat rotting meat from carcasses, which is contaminated with bacteria and even feces that would likely kill other animals. Yet it seems as if these birds are actually immune to the cocktail of deadly microbes.

"To investigate vultures' ability to survive eating this putrid cocktail, we generated DNA profiles from the community of bacteria living on the face and gut of 50 vultures from the USA," said Lars Hestbjerg Hansen, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Our findings enable us to reconstruct both the similarities, and differences, between the bacteria found in turkey vultures and black vultures, distributed widely in the Western Hemisphere. Apparently something radical happens to the bacteria ingested during passage through the digestive system."

The researchers found that on average, the facial skin of cultures contained DNA from 528 different types of micro-organisms. However, the DNA from only 76 different types of micro-organisms were found in the gut of these birds. Obviously, something was happening between point A and point B.

"Our results show there has been strong adaptation in vultures when it comes to dealing with the toxic bacteria they digest," said Hansen. "On one hand vultures have developed an extremely tough digestive system, which simply acts to destroy the majority of the dangerous bacteria they ingest. On the other hand, vultures also appear to have developed a tolerance towards some of the deadly bacteria-species that would kill other animals actively seem to flourish in the vulture lower intestine."

The findings reveal how vultures manage to survive despite the bacteria that they consume. That said, scientists are still hoping to unearth future findings when it comes to the avian microbiome.

The findings are published in the journal Nature Communications.

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