Dataset Information

DNA metabarcoding allows non-invasive identification of arthropod prey provisioned to nestling Rufous hummingbirds (Selasphorus rufus).

ABSTRACT: Hummingbirds consume sugars from nectar, sap and honeydew, and obtain protein, fat and minerals from arthropods. To date, the identity of arthropod taxa in hummingbird diets has been investigated by observation of foraging or examination of alimentary tract contents. Direct examination of nestling provisioning adds the extra complication of disturbance to the young and mother. Here, we show that arthropod food items provisioned to Rufous hummingbird (Selasphorus rufus) nestlings can be identified by a safe and non-invasive protocol using next-generation sequencing (NGS) of DNA from nestling fecal pellets collected post-fledging. We found that females on southern Vancouver Island (British Columbia, Canada) provisioned nestlings with a wide range of arthropod taxa. The samples examined contained three Classes, eight Orders, 48 Families, and 87 Genera, with from one to 15 Families being identified in a single pellet. Soft-bodied Dipterans were found most frequently and had the highest relative abundance; hard-bodied prey items were absent from almost all samples. Substantial differences in taxa were found within season and between years, indicating the importance of multi-year sampling when defining a prey spectrum.

SUBMITTER: Moran AJ

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6407503 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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DNA metabarcoding allows non-invasive identification of arthropod prey provisioned to nestling Rufous hummingbirds (<i>Selasphorus rufus</i>).

Moran Alison J AJ Prosser Sean W J SWJ Moran Jonathan A JA

PeerJ 20190305

Hummingbirds consume sugars from nectar, sap and honeydew, and obtain protein, fat and minerals from arthropods. To date, the identity of arthropod taxa in hummingbird diets has been investigated by observation of foraging or examination of alimentary tract contents. Direct examination of nestling provisioning adds the extra complication of disturbance to the young and mother. Here, we show that arthropod food items provisioned to Rufous hummingbird (<i>Selasphorus rufus</i>) nestlings can be id ...[more]

PMID: 30863689

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Project description:Metabarcoding of arthropod communities can be used for assessing species diversity in tropical forests but the methodology requires validation for accurate and repeatable species occurrences in complex mixtures. This study investigates how the composition of ecological samples affects the accuracy of species recovery.Starting with field-collected bulk samples from the tropical canopy, the recovery of specimens was tested for subsets of different body sizes and major taxa, by assembling these subsets into increasingly complex composite pools. After metabarcoding, we track whether richness, diversity, and most importantly composition of any size class or taxonomic subset are affected by the presence of other subsets in the mixture.Operational taxonomic units (OTUs) greatly exceeded the number of morphospecies in most taxa, even under very stringent sequencing read filtering. There was no significant effect on the recovered OTU richness of small and medium-sized arthropods when metabarcoded alongside larger arthropods, despite substantial biomass differences in the mixture. The recovery of taxonomic subsets was not generally influenced by the presence of other taxa, although with some exceptions likely due to primer mismatches. Considerable compositional variation within size and taxon-based subcommunities was evident resulting in high beta-diversity among samples from within a single tree canopy, but this beta-diversity was not affected by experimental manipulation.We conclude that OTU recovery in complex arthropod communities, with sufficient sequencing depth and within reasonable size ranges, is not skewed by variable biomass of the constituent species. This could remove the need for time-intensive manual sorting prior to metabarcoding. However, there remains a chance of taxonomic bias, which may be primer-dependent. There will never be a panacea primer; instead, metabarcoding studies should carefully consider whether the aim is broadscale turnover, in which case these biases may not be important, or species lists, in which case separate PCRs and sequencing might be necessary. OTU number inflation remains an issue in metabarcoding and requires bioinformatic development, particularly in read filtering and OTU clustering, and/or greater use of species-identifying sequences generated outside of bulk sequencing.

Dataset Information

DNA metabarcoding allows non-invasive identification of arthropod prey provisioned to nestling Rufous hummingbirds (Selasphorus rufus).

Publications

DNA metabarcoding allows non-invasive identification of arthropod prey provisioned to nestling Rufous hummingbirds (<i>Selasphorus rufus</i>).

Similar Datasets

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