Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2022 Nov;31(21):5635-5648.
doi: 10.1111/mec.16688. Epub 2022 Sep 22.

Two is better than one: Coupling DNA metabarcoding and stable isotope analysis improves dietary characterizations for a riparian-obligate, migratory songbird

Brandon D Hoenig  1 , Brian K Trevelline  2   3 , Andrea Kautz  4 , Steven C Latta  5 , Brady A Porter  1
Affiliations

Two is better than one: Coupling DNA metabarcoding and stable isotope analysis improves dietary characterizations for a riparian-obligate, migratory songbird

Brandon D Hoenig et al. Mol Ecol. 2022 Nov.

Abstract

While an increasing number of studies are adopting molecular and chemical methods for dietary characterization, these studies often employ only one of these laboratory-based techniques; this approach may yield an incomplete, or even biased, understanding of diet due to each method's inherent limitations. To explore the utility of coupling molecular and chemical techniques for dietary characterizations, we applied DNA metabarcoding alongside stable isotope analysis to characterize the dietary niche of breeding Louisiana waterthrush (Parkesia motacilla), a migratory songbird hypothesized to preferentially provision its offspring with pollution-intolerant, aquatic arthropod prey. While DNA metabarcoding was unable to determine if waterthrush provision aquatic and terrestrial prey in different abundances, we found that specific aquatic taxa were more likely to be detected in successive seasons than their terrestrial counterparts, thus supporting the aquatic specialization hypothesis. Our isotopic analysis added greater context to this hypothesis by concluding that breeding waterthrush provisioned Ephemeroptera and Plecoptera, two pollution-intolerant, aquatic orders, in higher quantities than other prey groups, and expanded their functional trophic niche when such prey were not abundantly provisioned. Finally, we found that the dietary characterizations from each approach were often uncorrelated, indicating that the results gleaned from a diet study can be particularly sensitive to the applied methodologies. Our findings contribute to a growing body of work indicating the importance of high-quality, aquatic habitats for both consumers and their pollution-intolerant prey, while also demonstrating how the application of multiple, laboratory-based techniques can provide insights not offered by either technique alone.

Keywords: DNA metabarcoding; arthropods; diet; mixing models; stable isotope analysis; trophic niche.

PubMed Disclaimer

References

REFERENCES

    1. Alberdi, A., Aizpurua, O., Gilbert, M. T. P., & Bohmann, K. (2018). Scrutinizing key steps for reliable metabarcoding of environmental samples. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 9(1), 134-147.
    1. Arrizabalaga-Escudero, A., Merckx, T., García-Baquero, G., Wahlberg, N., Aizpurua, O., Garin, I., Goiti, U., & Aihartza, J. (2019). Trait-based functional dietary analysis provides a better insight into the foraging ecology of bats. Journal of Animal Ecology, 88(10), 1587-1600.
    1. Bearhop, S., Teece, M. A., Waldron, S., & Furness, R. W. (2000). Influence of lipid and uric acid on δ13C and δ15N values of avian blood: Implications for trophic studies. The Auk, 117(2), 504-507.
    1. Birkhofer, K., & Wolters, V. (2012). The global relationship between climate, net primary production and the diet of spiders. Wiley Online Library.
    1. Bolyen, E., Rideout, J. R., Dillon, M. R., Bokulich, N. A., Abnet, C. C., Al-Ghalith, G. A., Alexander, H., Arumugam, M., Asnicar, F., Bai, Y., Bisanz, J. E., Bittinger, K., Brejnrod, A., Brislawn, C. J., Brown, T. T., Callahan, B. J., Caraballo-Rodriguez, A. M., Chase, J., … Caporaso, J. G. (2019). Reproducible, interactive, scalable and extensible microbiome data science using QIIME 2. Nature Biotechnology, 37(8), 852-857.

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources