Fecal Metabarcoding for Painted Bunting Conservation

After-second-year male Painted Bunting (Passerina ciris) at Lake Lewisville Environmental Learning Area. Photo: UNT Painted Bunting Project

 
 

A powerful tool for bird ecology and conservation

BACKGROUND: Painted Buntings (Passerina ciris) are eye-catching songbirds who fall within a family of birds, Cardinalidae, that has seen a 43% decline in population in the last 50 years. Despite widespread interest in songbirds and their ecology by the scientific community 5 and citizen scientists, there is surprisingly little known about the diets of many abundant bird species, including the Painted Bunting. What little information is known about these birds' diet was gathered by time-consuming or invasive methods that can potentially harm or stress them, and these methods do not always produce quality data 6. These issues cause large gaps in known information about the makeup of their diets; additionally, most of the life history studies documenting this information were conducted in the early 1900s 6. Understanding what organisms eat is critically important for understanding how best to conserve them1, the role they play in their local food webs2, and the services they contribute to their ecosystems 3,4. Past studies have failed to highlight diet shifts during the pre- and post-breeding periods, as well as diet differences across sex and age.

Figure 1. Summary of fecal eDNA metabarcoding pipeline.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION: I will use DNA metabarcoding–a revolutionary technique that allows scientists to determine what organisms have left DNA in any environmental sample–to illuminate the diets of Painted Buntings by looking at what DNA is found in their feces (Figure 1). This will allow us to determine everything these birds consumed without requiring difficult identification of partially digested food items. I will capitalize on the Lake Lewisville Environmental Learning Area (LLELA), a ~2,600 acre nature preserve in the middle of the DFW area, to study Painted Buntings throughout the breeding season and prior to their migration. Specifically, we will address the following three objectives: 

  • Aim 1: Test fecal collection method and determine if fecal mass or extraction kit effect DNA yield.

  • Aim 2: Collect and preserve environmental DNA (to determine the pool of food resources) and fecal DNA from Painted Buntings throughout the breeding season at LLELA to determine diet and diet shifts during three key time periods: a) pre-breeding, b) during the breeding season, and c) in the lead-up to fall migration.

  • Aim 3: Extract diet DNA from samples for DNA amplification, sequencing, bioinformatics, and analysis.

HOW TO CONTRIBUTE: To learn more about this project and make a donation, please see the project page at the following link: experiment.com/paintedbunting