Abstract
Reintroduction of the threatened red-crowned crane has been unsuccessful. Although gut microbiota correlates with host health, there is little information on gut microbiota of cranes under different conservation strategies. The study examined effects of captivity, artificial breeding and life stage on gut microbiota of red-crown cranes. The gut microbiotas of wild, captive adolescent, captive adult, artificially bred adolescent and artificially bred adult cranes were characterized by next-generation sequencing of 16S rRNA gene amplicons. The gut microbiotas were dominated by three phyla: Firmicutes (62.9%), Proteobacteria (29.9%) and Fusobacteria (9.6%). Bacilli dominated the ‘core’ community consisting of 198 operational taxonomic units (OTUs). Both captivity and artificial breeding influenced the structures and diversities microbiota of the gut. Especially, wild cranes had distinct compositions of gut microbiota from captive and artificially bred cranes. The greatest alpha diversity was found in captive cranes, while wild cranes had the least. According to the results of ordination analysis, influences of captivity and artificial breeding were greater than that of life stage. Overall, captivity and artificial breeding influenced the gut microbiota, potentially due to changes in diet, vaccination, antibiotics and living conditions. Metagenomics can serve as a supplementary non-invasive screening tool for disease control.
Highlights
Microbiota in the gut plays important roles in nutrition[17,18], development of organs[19,20,21] and regulation of host physiology[22,23]
A total of 1,164 OTUs representing 25 bacterial phyla were identified in feces of G. japonensis
Microbiota in guts of G. japonensis was dominated by Firmicutes (62.9%) which is consistent with results of previous studies of a range of avian species, such as gull[28], Canada goose[29], procellariform seabirds[30] and kakapo[31,32], where members of the phylum Firmicutes dominated microbiota of guts
Summary
Microbiota in the gut plays important roles in nutrition[17,18], development of organs[19,20,21] and regulation of host physiology[22,23] Both captivity and artificial breeding can influence microbial communities in guts of wildlife due to vaccination against diseases, use of antibiotics to control diseases and changes in diets and living conditions[24,25,26]. Using next-generation sequencing of 16s rRNA gene with non-invasive collection of feces, diversities of microbes in guts of cranes from three groups, wild, captive and artificially bred, were investigated. Both captive and artificially bred groupes were further divided into two life stages: adolescent and adult. Specific research questions included: 1) to examine the structures of microbial communities in guts of G. japonensis; 2) to evaluate the effects of captivity, artificial breeding and/or host life stage on the gut microbiota of cranes
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