The low-diversity fecal microbiota of the critically endangered kakapo is robust to anthropogenic dietary and geographic influences

Abstract

The critically endangered kakapo, an herbivorous parrot endemic to New Zealand, is subject to intensive management to increase its population size. Key aspects of the management program include supplementary feeding and translocation of kakapo between different predator-free islands to optimize the genetic composition of the breeding populations. While these practices have helped boost the kakapo population, their impact on the kakapo fecal microbiota is uncertain. Previous studies have found that the kakapo possesses a low-diversity fecal microbiota, typically dominated by Escherichia/Shigella spp. However, the question of whether the low diversity of the kakapo fecal microbiota is an inadvertent consequence of human interventions has yet to be investigated. To that end, we used high-throughput Illumina sequencing of 16S rRNA gene amplicons obtained from fecal material of 63 kakapo representing different diets, islands, and ages. Remarkably, neither supplementary feeding nor geographic location were associated with significant differences in the overall fecal microbial community structures of adult kakapo, suggesting that the kakapo's low-diversity fecal microbiota is both inherent to this species and robust to these external influences.