ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2019
Microbial communities in hummingbird feeders are distinct from floral nectar and influenced by bird visitation.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- Diversity and sources of floral microbial communities.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2026Review
- Comparative characterization of oral and cloacal microbiomes in captive adult and juvenile coconut lorikeets (Veterinary world · 2026Article
- Floral microbes provisioned by Osmia lignaria establish in larval food stores, but do not affect bee development or survival.FEMS microbiology ecology · 2026Article
- Migration-driven microbial adaptation and ecological spillover in birds.ISME communications · 2026Review
- Urbanization and the Gut Microbiome: Insights From the Anna's Hummingbird (Calypte anna) in California.Integrative and comparative biology · 2025Article
- The seed microbiota from an application perspective: an underexplored frontier in plant-microbe interactions.Crop health · 2025Review
- More Than a Stick in the Mud: Eelgrass Leaf and Root Bacterial Communities Are Distinct From Those on Physical Mimics.Environmental microbiology reports · 2025Article
- Hummingbird ingestion of low-concentration ethanol within artificial nectar.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Nectar resources affect bird-dispersed microbial metacommunities in suburban and rural gardens.Environmental microbiology · 2022Article
- Potential effects of nectar microbes on pollinator health.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Article
- Defining gut mycobiota for wild animals: a need for caution in assigning authentic resident fungal taxa.Animal microbiome · 2021Article
- Direct Evidence That Sunbirds' Gut Microbiota Degrades Floral Nectar's Toxic Alkaloids.Frontiers in microbiology · 2021Article
- The effect of toxic pyridine-alkaloid secondary metabolites on the sunbird gut microbiome.NPJ biofilms and microbiomes · 2020Article
- Anti-microbial activity of whole blood and plasma collected from Anna's Hummingbirds (Calypte anna) against three different microbes.PloS one · 2020Article
- Characterizing the nectar microbiome of the non-native tropical milkweed, Asclepias curassavica, in an urban environment.PloS one · 2020Article
- Microbial communities in hummingbird feeders are distinct from floral nectar and influenced by bird visitation.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Human provisioning can shape resource availability for wildlife, but consequences for microbiota availability and exchange remain relatively unexplored. Here, we characterized microbial communities on bills and faecal material of hummingbirds and their food resources, including feeders and floral nectar. We experimentally manipulated bird visitation to feeders and examined effects on sucrose solution microbial communities. Birds, feeders and flowers hosted distinct bacterial and fungal communities. Proteobacteria comprised over 80% of nectar bacteria but feeder solutions contained a high relative abundance of Proteobacteria, Firmicutes and Actinobacteria. Hummingbirds hosted bacterial taxa commonly found in other birds and novel genera including Zymobacter [Proteobacteria] and Ascomycete fungi. For feeders, bird-visited and unvisited solutions both accumulated abundant microbial populations that changed solution pH, but microbial composition was largely determined by visitation treatment. Our results reveal that feeders host abundant microbial populations, including some bird-associated microbial taxa. Microbial taxa in feeders were primarily non-pathogenic bacteria and fungi but differed substantially from those in floral nectar. These results demonstrate that human provisioning influences microbial intake by free-ranging hummingbirds; however, it is unknown how these changes impact hummingbird gastrointestinal flora or health.
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