Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Frolov, Andrey V
• Akhmetova, Lilia A
• Vishnevskaya, Maria S
• Kiriukhin, Bogdan A
• Montreuil, Olivier
• Lopes, Fernando
• Tarasov, Sergey I

Titel

Amplicon metagenomics of dung beetles studies in Madagascar

Ist Teil von

• ZooKeys, 2023-09 (6), p.29

Ort / Verlag

Pensoft Publishers

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Quelle

EZB Electronic Journals Library

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Dung beetles (Scarabaeidae, Scarabaeinae) are among the most cost-effective and informative biodiversity indicator groups, conveying rich information about the status of habitats and faunas of an area. Yet their use for monitoring the mammal species, that are the main providers of the food for the dung beetles, has only recently been recognized. In the present work, we studied the diet of four endemic Madagascan dung beetles (Helictopleurus fissicollis (Fairmaire), H. giganteus (Harold), Nanos agaboides (Boucomont), and Epilissus splendidus Fairmaire) using high-throughput sequencing and amplicon metagenomics. For all beetle species, the â-¾ of reads belonged to humans, suggesting that human feces are the main source of food for the beetles in the examined areas. The second most abundant were the reads of the cattle (Bos taurus Linnaeus). We also found lower but significant number of reads of six lemur species belonging to three genera. Our sampling localities agree well with the known ranges of these lemur species. The amplicon metagenomics method proved a promising tool for the lemur inventories in Madagascar.