Using carrion flies to assess mammalian biodiversity in sub-Saharan Africa. Fly meal analysis

Assessing mammalian biodiversitiy is a challenging task. Especially in the tropics where biodiversity is extremely high, vegetation dense and infrastructure poor. Here, we used carrion flies to get insights into the mammalian biodiversity of remote areas in sub-Saharan Africa. Carrion flies are ubiquitous and are known to feed on mammal carcasses. Thus, they can be seen as samplers of mammalian DNA. Applying a metabarcoding approach we sequenced a short 16s fragment using the Illumina sequencing platform MiSeq and performed taxonomic assignement using the OBITools package.