MetaBARFcoding: DNA-barcoding of regurgitated prey yields insights into Christmas Shearwater (Puffinus nativitatis) foraging ecology at Hōlanikū (Kure Atoll), Hawaiʻi

Morphological identification of digested prey remains from a generalist predator can be challenging, especially when attempting to match degraded remains to taxonomic keys. DNA techniques, whereby prey is sequenced and matched to large public nucleotide sequence databases, are increasingly being used to augment morphological identification. We used “metaBARFcoding” (DNA metabarcoding) to target a region of the cytochrome c oxidase subunit I mitochondrial gene to identify prey in highly-digested regurgitations from Christmas Shearwaters Puffinus nativitatis at Hōlanikū (Kure Atoll). Metabarcoding was used to bulk-process 92 water samples from regurgitations collected from 2009-2017, providing an overview of the seabird’s diet. We additionally Sanger sequenced 100 prey items from 50 randomly chosen regurgitations to verify that metabarcoding characterized key components of the diet. The metabarcoding technique identified 87 unique taxa from 29 families of fish and squid, spanning diverse ...

广食性捕食者消化后猎物残骸的形态学鉴定颇具挑战，尤其是在尝试将降解残骸与分类检索表匹配时。DNA技术——即对猎物进行测序并与大型公共核苷酸序列数据库匹配——正日益用于补充形态学鉴定。我们使用"metaBARFcoding"（DNA宏条形码技术，DNA metabarcoding）靶向细胞色素c氧化酶亚基I线粒体基因的一个区域，以鉴定来自HōlanikÅ«（库雷环礁，Kure Atoll）的圣诞鹱（Christmas Shearwaters，Puffinus nativitatis）高度消化的呕吐物中的猎物。宏条形码技术用于批量处理2009-2017年收集的呕吐物中的92份水样，从而获得该海鸟的饮食概况。此外，我们对来自50份随机选择的呕吐物中的100个猎物样本进行了桑格测序（Sanger sequencing），以验证宏条形码技术能否表征饮食的关键成分。宏条形码技术从鱼类和头足类的29个科中鉴定出87个独特分类单元，涵盖多样的……