Research Institute for the Environment and Livelihoods, Charles Darwin University, Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia.
PeerJ. 2022 Jul 25;10:e13600. doi: 10.7717/peerj.13600. eCollection 2022.
, the orange-footed scrubfowl, belongs to a small family of birds that inhabits the Indo-Australian region. Megapodes are unique in incubating their eggs in mounds using heat from microbial decomposition of organic materials and solar radiation. Little is known about the microorganisms involved in the decomposition of organic matter in mounds. To determine the source of microbes in the mounds, we used 16S and 18S rRNA gene sequencing to characterize the microbial communities of mound soil, adjacent soil and scrubfowl faeces. We found that the microbial communities of scrubfowl faeces were substantially different from those of the mounds and surrounding soils, suggesting that scrubfowls probably do not use their faeces to inoculate their mounds although a few microbial sequence variants were present in both faeces and mound samples. Further, the mound microbial community structure was significantly different to the adjacent soils. For example, mounds had a high relative abundance of sequence variants belonging to , a thermophilic soil bacteria family able to degrade cellulose from plant residues. It is not clear whether members of disproportionately contribute to the generation of heat in the mound, or whether they simply thrive in the warm mound environment created by the metabolic activity of the mound microbial community. The lack of clarity in the literature between designations of heat-producing (thermogenic) and heat-thriving (thermophilic) microbes poses a challenge to understanding the role of specific bacteria and fungi in incubation.
橙脚 scrubfowl 属于一个栖息在印度-澳大利亚地区的鸟类小家庭。巨䴕在利用微生物分解有机物质和太阳辐射产生的热量在土丘中孵化它们的蛋方面是独一无二的。关于土丘中参与有机物质分解的微生物知之甚少。为了确定土丘中微生物的来源，我们使用 16S 和 18S rRNA 基因测序来描述土丘土壤、相邻土壤和 scrubfowl 粪便中的微生物群落。我们发现 scrubfowl 粪便中的微生物群落与土丘和周围土壤的微生物群落有很大的不同，这表明 scrubfowls 可能不会用它们的粪便来接种它们的土丘，尽管粪便和土丘样本中都存在一些微生物序列变体。此外，土丘微生物群落结构与相邻土壤有显著差异。例如，土丘中属于的序列变体相对丰度较高，是一种能够降解植物残体中纤维素的嗜热土壤细菌科。目前还不清楚 是否会不成比例地为土丘产生热量做出贡献，或者它们是否只是在土丘微生物群落代谢活动产生的温暖环境中茁壮成长。文献中对产热（发热）和热适应（嗜热）微生物的定义不明确，这给理解特定细菌和真菌在孵化中的作用带来了挑战。
