Di Bernardi Cecilia, Wikenros Camilla, Hedmark Eva, Boitani Luigi, Ciucci Paolo, Sand Håkan, Åkesson Mikael
Department of Biology and Biotechnologies "Charles Darwin" University of Rome La Sapienza Rome Italy.
Grimsö Wildlife Research Station Department of Ecology Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences Riddarhyttan Sweden.
Ecol Evol. 2021 Aug 1;11(17):11739-11748. doi: 10.1002/ece3.7918. eCollection 2021 Sep.
Large carnivore feeding ecology plays a crucial role for management and conservation for predators and their prey. One of the keys to this kind of research is to identify the species composition in the predator diet, for example, prey determination from scat content. DNA-based methods applied to detect prey in predators' scats are viable alternatives to traditional macroscopic approaches, showing an increased reliability and higher prey detection rate. Here, we developed a molecular method for prey species identification in wolf () scats using multiple species-specific marker loci on the cytochrome gene for 18 target species. The final panel consisted of 80 assays, with a minimum of four markers per target species, and that amplified specifically when using a high-throughput Nanofluidic array technology (Fluidigm Inc.). As a practical example, we applied the method to identify target prey species DNA in 80 wolf scats collected in Sweden. Depending on the number of amplifying markers required to obtain a positive species call in a scat, the success in determining at least one prey species from the scats ranged from 44% to 92%. Although we highlight the need to evaluate the optimal number of markers for sensitive target species detection, the developed method is a fast and cost-efficient tool for prey identification in wolf scats and it also has the potential to be further developed and applied to other areas and large carnivores as well.
大型食肉动物的觅食生态学对食肉动物及其猎物的管理和保护起着至关重要的作用。这类研究的关键之一是确定食肉动物饮食中的物种组成，例如，通过粪便内容物确定猎物。应用基于DNA的方法来检测食肉动物粪便中的猎物是传统宏观方法的可行替代方案，具有更高的可靠性和猎物检出率。在此，我们开发了一种分子方法，利用细胞色素基因上针对18个目标物种的多个物种特异性标记位点，来鉴定狼粪便中的猎物物种。最终的检测组合包括80种分析方法，每个目标物种至少有4个标记，并且在使用高通量纳米流体阵列技术（Fluidigm公司）时能特异性扩增。作为一个实际例子，我们将该方法应用于鉴定在瑞典收集的80份狼粪便中的目标猎物物种DNA。根据在一份粪便中获得阳性物种鉴定所需的扩增标记数量，从粪便中确定至少一种猎物物种的成功率在44%至92%之间。尽管我们强调需要评估用于灵敏检测目标物种的最佳标记数量，但所开发的方法是一种快速且经济高效的鉴定狼粪便中猎物的工具，并且它还有进一步开发并应用于其他领域和大型食肉动物的潜力。
