Square salads: exploring the diet of the southern hairy-nosed wombat (Lasiorhinus latifrons) via DNA metabarcoding
Colin J. Sobek A B C and Faith M. Walker A B
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations
A Bat Ecology & Genetics Lab, School of Forestry, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Arizona, USA.
B Pathogen and Microbiome Institute, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Arizona, USA.
C Corresponding author. Email Colin.Sobek@nau.edu
Australian Mammalogy 43(1) 104-109 https://doi.org/10.1071/AM20021
Submitted: 23 February 2020 Accepted: 19 October 2020 Published: 12 November 2020
Abstract
Southern hairy-nosed wombats (Lasiorhinus latifrons) are large semi-fossorial marsupials that inhabit semiarid areas of southern South Australia and southeast Western Australia. Despite their size and prominence on the landscape, little is published about diet and foraging preferences. Further, it is unclear whether this wombat species’ diet overlaps with sympatric western grey kangaroos (Macropus fuliginosus), which are locally abundant across the southern hairy-nosed wombat’s distribution. Competition for food resources may be an added stressor in Murraylands populations where kangaroos are plentiful. Here, we identified diet items and dietary overlap of southern hairy-nosed wombats and western grey kangaroos. We accomplished this by opportunistically sampling fresh faecal pellets from both species at Brookfield Conservation Park in April 2017. We performed DNA metabarcoding via Illumina next generation sequencing of the faecal DNA using the plant ITS2 gene. We identified 10 genera in the wombat diet and 20 in the diet of kangaroos; diets of both species included native and introduced genera. Eight genera were shared between both marsupials. This work highlights the capabilities of non-invasive genetic sampling in concert with DNA metabarcoding to elucidate diet and dietary overlap between species.
Keywords: amplicon sequencing, bare-nosed wombat, degraded rangelands, diet, high-throughput sequencing, Lasiorhinus latifrons, resource depletion, semi-fossorial marsupials, southern hairy-nosed wombats, Vombatus ursinius, western grey kangaroos.
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