Abstract
Deforestation continues to jeopardize Malagasy primates as viable habitats become smaller, more fragmented, and more disturbed. This deforestation can lead to changes in diet, microhabitat, and gene flow between populations of endangered species, and it remains unclear how these changes may affect gut microbiome (GM) characteristics. The black-and-white ruffed lemur (Varecia variegata), which is among Madagascar's most threatened lemur species, provides a critical model for understanding the relationships between historical and on-going deforestation (habitat disturbance), feeding ecology, and GM composition and diversity. We studied four populations inhabiting two rainforests (relatively pristine vs. highly disturbed) in southeastern Madagascar. We conducted full-day focal animal behavioral follows and collected fecal samples opportunistically across a three-month period. Our results indicate that lemurs inhabiting sites characterized by habitat disturbance and low dietary diversity exhibited reduced gut microbial alpha diversity. We also show that these same factors were associated with high community dissimilarity using weighted and unweighted UniFrac metrics. Finally, an indicator species analysis showed that the most pristine site was characterized by an abundance of methanogenic archaea. While it is impossible to disentangle the relative contributions of each confounding variable presented by our sampling design, these results provide crucial information about GM variability, thereby underscoring the importance of monitoring endangered species at the population-level.
Original language | English |
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Article number | e23046 |
Journal | American Journal of Primatology |
Volume | 81 |
Issue number | 10-11 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Oct 1 2019 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The authors thank the Madagascar Ministry of Environment, Forests, and Ecology, the Madagascar National Parks in Ranomafana National Park and Manombo Special Reserve for allowing us to conduct this field research, and Center ValBio Research station and MICET/ICTE for logistical support. The authors thank Feno, De l'Or Boto, Velontsara Baptiste, and Elizabeth Wallace for their help with data collection, in addition to Katie Everson, Derek Filipek, Levi Gray, Kara Jones, and Thomas Maigret for their role in editing this manuscript. Finally, we thank Dr. Robert Thacker for all of his advice and guidance. This study was funded by the National Geographic Young Explorer's Grant #9819-15, Primate Conservation Inc Grant #74892, NSF BCS 0935347 and 0820709, and the Woese Institute for Genomic Biology and the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. This study was approved by the Stony Brook University IACUC and complied with Malagasy laws.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Keywords
- dietary diversity
- gut microbiome
- habitat disturbance
- lemur
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
- Animal Science and Zoology