Comparison of the fecal microbiota in arctic migratory birds during breeding season.

Abstract

The gut microbiota of birds are inherited and characterized among the species, but change flexibly with breeding status and feeding items. In this study, we questioned whether different bird species with similar feeding habitats share analogous gut microbiota during the breeding season. And non-breeding species have distinctive microbiota during moulting period. In the same habitat, we choose three migratory arctic bird species (snow bunting, sanderling and pink-footed goose) that are phylogenetically quite distant each other in different families, and share different feeding habitats. We collected faecal samples and characterized the prevalence of gut bacteria using Illumina Miseq platform to sequence bacterial 16S rRNA genes. Our results showed that three arctic birds were dominated by three bacterial phyla (Proteobacteria, Firmicutus and Bacteroidetes). However, snow buntings and sanderlings were dominated by Firmicutus and Bacteroidetes but proteobacteria was dominating in pink-footed geese. This suggests that feeding habitat and breeding status are possibly the strongest factor that affecting gut microbiota of arctic migratory birds during the breeding season.