Moran Alison J, Prosser Sean W J, Moran Jonathan A
Hummingbird Project, Rocky Point Bird Observatory, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.
Centre for Biodiversity Genomics, Biodiversity Institute of Ontario, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada.
PeerJ. 2019 Mar 5;7:e6596. doi: 10.7717/peerj.6596. eCollection 2019.
Hummingbirds consume sugars from nectar, sap and honeydew, and obtain protein, fat and minerals from arthropods. To date, the identity of arthropod taxa in hummingbird diets has been investigated by observation of foraging or examination of alimentary tract contents. Direct examination of nestling provisioning adds the extra complication of disturbance to the young and mother. Here, we show that arthropod food items provisioned to Rufous hummingbird () nestlings can be identified by a safe and non-invasive protocol using next-generation sequencing (NGS) of DNA from nestling fecal pellets collected post-fledging. We found that females on southern Vancouver Island (British Columbia, Canada) provisioned nestlings with a wide range of arthropod taxa. The samples examined contained three Classes, eight Orders, 48 Families, and 87 Genera, with from one to 15 Families being identified in a single pellet. Soft-bodied Dipterans were found most frequently and had the highest relative abundance; hard-bodied prey items were absent from almost all samples. Substantial differences in taxa were found within season and between years, indicating the importance of multi-year sampling when defining a prey spectrum.
蜂鸟从花蜜、树液和蜜露中摄取糖分，并从节肢动物中获取蛋白质、脂肪和矿物质。迄今为止，通过观察觅食行为或检查消化道内容物来研究蜂鸟食谱中节肢动物类群的种类。直接检查雏鸟的食物供应情况会给雏鸟和母鸟带来额外的干扰。在这里，我们表明，通过对雏鸟离巢后收集的粪便颗粒进行下一代测序（NGS），可以采用一种安全且非侵入性的方法来识别向棕煌蜂鸟（）雏鸟提供的节肢动物食物。我们发现，加拿大不列颠哥伦比亚省温哥华岛南部的雌性为雏鸟提供了种类繁多的节肢动物类群。所检查的样本包含三个纲、八个目、48个科和87个属，单个粪便颗粒中鉴定出的科数从1到15个不等。软体双翅目昆虫出现的频率最高，相对丰度也最高；几乎所有样本中都没有硬体猎物。在季节内和年份间发现了类群的显著差异，这表明在确定猎物谱时进行多年采样的重要性。
