Falcon gut is dominated by Firmicutes and predicted functional pathways associated with <i>Salmonella</i>.

(A) Abundance of gut bacterial phyla in the 29 falcons from this study. Firmicutes is the most dominant phyla followed by Actinobacteria, Proteobacteria and Tenericutes. (B) Pco1 was strongly correlated with species richness (Pearson’s r = 0.8, p = 0.001) in falcons from this study. (C) PCoA analysis using Bray-Curtis distances of PICRUSt2-generated MetaCyc pathway abundances reveals difference in falcon gut microbiota functions by Salmonella abundance (left). Boxplot showing relative abundance of Salmonella (log scaled) across the three groups (right). (D) Heatmap of 69 differentially abundant pathways differentiating the birds with and without Salmonella. Dendrogram from hierarchical clustering (left) separates individuals with undetected Salmonella. Differentially abundant pathways associated with immunity and pathogenicity are shown in bold.