The endangered New Zealand kakapo is the world’s heaviest parrot, flightless and nocturnal, with fragrant moss-green plumage, a strange whiskered face and a lifespan of up to 90 years. , the gut microbiome is almost entirely made up of this bacterium. Escherichia coliLike humans, other animals harbor trillions of bacteria, viruses, archaea, and fungi in their digestive tracts, skin, and elsewhere. The internal ecosystem helps animals extract nutrients from food, fight pathogens, and develop immunity. Now, as gene sequencing becomes cheaper and more sophisticated, scientists are exploring the unique microbiomes of endangered animals and discovering insights that could help stop extinction. It offers.
Studies like this reveal that kakapo are just as weird on the inside as they are on the outside, says Annie West, a microbial ecologist at the University of Auckland. About 250 kakapo remain on his five remote predator-free islands and are intensively managed by the New Zealand Wildlife Authority. In 2019, government workers and volunteers collected fresh brownish-green faeces and nest material from 67 growing chicks and sent the samples to West for his DNA analysis.
Escherichia coli Although it is widespread in the human digestive system, it makes up a small fraction of the bacteria that live there. Previous research had shown that this microbe dominated the gut of adult kakapo . This proportion varies greatly from individual to individual, sometimes making up 99% of his total microbiome.A new study by West and her colleagues was reported in animal microbiomeimmediately after the kakapo hatches, Escherichia coli It already forms the majority of its microbes in its gut. And this dominance only increases as the chicks grow.
“It’s very unusual. If you saw it in humans, you’d be worried,” West says. A very homogeneous microbiome may be a cause for concern, as it may not be able to perform its functions. I will add. The researchers also found that when kakapo chicks were fed baby parrot food, different bacteria took over the microbiome instead.
The kakapo’s simplified microbiome may be partly explained by the bird’s extreme rarity. has also been shown to be lost, says Lieng Zhu, an ecologist at China’s Nanjing Normal University. “We need to protect not only the diversity of ecosystems and species, but also the microbiome diversity within animals,” says Zhu. Climate change, habitat degradation, human contact, and time in captivity can all dramatically alter an animal’s microbiome, he explains.
Zhu’s own research shows that breeding giant pandas have a very different microbiome than wild pandas. When a captive panda is released, its microbiome has to change over the course of a year, during which the panda is more likely to get sick. “We realized that we needed not just the wildness of panda behavior, but the wildness of the gut microbiome,” he says.
Elizabeth Dinsdale, a marine biologist at Flinders University who dives with sharks to collect samples of skin microbes, said biologists are learning what is on and inside endangered species. They say they are still sorting out where the microbes live and how their communities change over time. About 90% of the microbes she discovered were new to science, and her team identified different populations of whale sharks by their typical skin microbiome.
The next big question is what are all these microbes doing to their hosts? Whole-genome sequencing can provide clues by revealing the genes that make proteins for tasks such as fiber digestion, salt tolerance, and heavy metal handling. Laboratory colony cultures to help confirm the role of microbes are currently time consuming, expensive and difficult for many microbes. But emerging robotic technologies are accelerating this process, allowing scientists to observe how each microbe behaves in concert with others.
Several researchers are already experimenting with microbiome engineering. For example, the coral mucus microbiome is sensitive to temperature and pollution. Excessively warm waters can encourage the shedding of the symbiotic microalgae that corals depend on, causing bleaching. By treating corals with “a kind of microbial elixir,” they are testing whether they can survive the climate. Other ecologists in Australia have shown that it is possible to alter the koala’s microbiome with fecal transplants so that the iconic marsupial can digest different types of eucalyptus.
In the United States, Valerie J. McKenzie’s lab at the University of Colorado Boulder is using probiotics to save boreal toads from chytrid fungus. Amphibians have a rich microbiome in their mucus-coated skin. Batracochytrium dendrobatidis attack. McKenzie’s team identified a potent antifungal bacterium found naturally in the endangered toad’s Rocky Mountain habitat and present in small amounts on its skin. In the lab, the group showed that administering this probiotic microbe to a toad increased his ability to survive a fungal infection by 40%.
Next, Mackenzie and her colleagues captured young wild toads, placed them in spa-like “water hotels,” and bathed them in probiotics for 24 hours before releasing them. For the treatment to be effective, “you have to attack them at the time of their full development,” says Mackenzie. There were few illnesses.
West hopes that her microbiome research will one day lead to similar treatments for kakapo. can give caregivers early warning of illness, she says. “The idea is that instead of taking invasive samples, profiling her microbiome could be used to identify when an animal becomes sick, even if no visible symptoms have yet been seen,” she said. says West. “And it’s starting to have a big impact on conservation programs.”
