These microbial communities, termed gut microbiota, may influence a wide range of metabolic, developmental, and physiological processes, affecting host health, fitness, and even behavior. The gastrointestinal tract is now recognized as being largely sterile in newborn vertebrates, and is subsequently colonized by diverse bacterial taxa varying in abundance and functional traits. In addition, several probiotics were found in chicks fostered by society finches, which are excellent foster parents for other finches in bird farms and hosts of brood parasitism by zebra finches in aviaries this finding implies that avian species that can transfer probiotics to chicks may become selectively preferred hosts of brood parasitism in nature. Gut microbial diversity was low in hand-reared chicks, emphasizing the importance of parental care in shaping the gut microbiota. Our study indicates that passerine chicks mainly acquire symbionts through indirect maternal transmission-passive environmental uptake from nests that were smeared with the intestinal and cloacal microbes of parents that raised them. The results suggest that oral feeding only affects the early stage of hatchling gut microbial development. Moreover, source-tracking models revealed high contribution of zebra finches’ oral cavity/crop microbiota to their chicks’ early gut microbiota, which were largely replaced by the parental gut microbiota at later stages. Using 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing, we found that zebra finch chicks raised by their biological or foster parents (the society finch Lonchura striata domestica) had gut microbial communities converging with those of the parents that reared them. In this study, we examined the contributions and transmission modes of maternal microbes into the neonatal microbiota of a passerine, the zebra finch ( Taeniopygia guttata), based on fostering experiments. Knowledge is growing on how gut microbiota are established, but the effects of maternal symbiotic microbes throughout early microbial successions in birds remain elusive.
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