ArticlePloS one2013
Unveiling the diet of elusive rainforest herbivores in next generation sequencing era? The tapir as a case study.
Article in PloS one, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.
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28 citing papers in PubMed.
- Unveiling the Dietary Selection of Lowland Tapirs (Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Authentication of the Botanical Origin of Honey:Journal of agricultural and food chemistry · 2025Article
- Forage preference in two geographically co-occurring fungus gardening ants: A dietary DNA approach.PloS one · 2025Article
- Article
- Foraging history of individual elephants using DNA metabarcoding.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Otterly delicious: Spatiotemporal variation in the diet of a recovering population of Eurasian otters (Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Strategies for sample labelling and library preparation in DNA metabarcoding studies.Molecular ecology resources · 2022Review
- Metagenomics: A viable tool for reconstructing herbivore diet.Molecular ecology resources · 2021Article
- Big trees drive forest structure patterns across a lowland Amazon regrowth gradient.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- A powerful long metabarcoding method for the determination of complex diets from faecal analysis of the European pond turtle (Emys orbicularis, L. 1758).Molecular ecology resources · 2021Article
- Microstructure of the Surface of the Tongue and Histochemical Study of the Lingual Glands of the Lowland Tapir (Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2020Article
- Population-level inferences from environmental DNA-Current status and future perspectives.Evolutionary applications · 2020Review
- Diverging landscape impacts on macronutrient status despite overlapping diets in managed (Conservation physiology · 2020Article
- Article
- Genetic and genomic monitoring with minimally invasive sampling methods.Evolutionary applications · 2018Article
- New universal ITS2 primers for high-resolution herbivory analyses using DNA metabarcoding in both tropical and temperate zones.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Observational
- Diversity of terrestrial mammal seed dispersers along a lowland Amazon forest regrowth gradient.PloS one · 2018Article
- DNA metabarcoding of orchid-derived products reveals widespread illegal orchid trade.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2017Article
- DNA metabarcoding for diet analysis and biodiversity: A case study using the endangered Australian sea lion (Ecology and evolution · 2017Article
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6 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Characterizing the trophic relationships between large herbivores and the outstanding plant diversity in rainforest is a major challenge because of their elusiveness. This is crucial to understand the role of these herbivores in the functioning of the rainforest ecosystems. We tested a non-invasive approach based on the high-throughput sequencing of environmental samples using small plant plastid sequences (the trnL P6 loop) and ribosomal ITS1 primers, referred to as DNA metabarcoding, to investigate the diet of the largest neotropical herbivore, the lowland tapir. Sequencing was performed on plant DNA extracted from tapir faeces collected at the Nouragues station, a protected area of French Guiana. In spite of a limited sampling, our approach reliably provided information about the lowland tapir's diet at this site. Indeed, 95.1% and 74.4% of the plant families and genera identified thanks to the trnL P6 loop, respectively, matched with taxa already known to be consumed by tapirs. With this approach we were able to show that two families and eight new genera are also consumed by the lowland tapir. The taxonomic resolution of this method is limited to the plant family and genera. Complementary barcodes, such as a small portion of ITS1, can be used to efficiently narrow identifications down to the species in some problematic families. We will discuss the remaining limitations of this approach and how useful it is at this stage to unravel the diet of elusive rainforest herbivores and better understand their role as engineers of the ecosystem.
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