ArticleEcology and evolution2022
DNA metabarcoding quantifies the relative biomass of arthropod taxa in songbird diets: Validation with camera-recorded diets.
Article in Ecology and evolution, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Soil Moisture and Prey Life Cycles Promote Seasonal Dietary Shift in a Grassland-Breeding Migratory Shorebird.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Mitogenome-Informed Metabarcoding for Non-Invasive Identification of Sympatric Flamingos in Northern Chile.Biology · 2026Article
- Predictors and consequences of diet composition in a declining generalist aerial insectivore.Oecologia · 2026Article
- Seasonal Dynamics of the Gut Microbiome in Urban Feral Pigeons Are Associated With Environmental Conditions, Not With Diet Shifts.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Article
- Demand-Resource Mismatch Explains Body Shrinkage in a Migratory Shorebird.Global change biology · 2025Article
- Gut microbiome communities demonstrate fine-scale spatial variation in a closed, island bird population.ISME communications · 2025Article
- Food availability aligns with contrasting demographics in populations of an at-risk songbird.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Molecular analysis of scats revealed diet and prey choice of grey wolves and Eurasian lynx in the contact zone between the Dinaric Mountains and the Alps.Frontiers in zoology · 2024Article
- Article
- Exploring and validating observations of non-local species in eDNA samples.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Assessment of the diet of the critically endangered northern hairy-nosed wombat (Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- The Food Niche Overlap and Interspecific Relationship between the Sympatric Tibetan Macaque and Grey Snub-Nosed Monkey.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
- Diet composition of wild columbiform birds: next-generation sequencing of plant and metazoan DNA in faecal samples.Die Naturwissenschaften · 2023Article
- Extracting abundance information from DNA-based data.Molecular ecology resources · 2023Review
- Hooking the scientific community on thorny-headed worms: interesting and exciting facts, knowledge gaps and perspectives for research directions on Acanthocephala.Parasite (Paris, France) · 2023Article
- Article
- DNA metabarcoding quantifies the relative biomass of arthropod taxa in songbird diets: Validation with camera-recorded diets.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Ecological research is often hampered by the inability to quantify animal diets. Diet composition can be tracked through DNA metabarcoding of fecal samples, but whether (complex) diets can be quantitatively determined with metabarcoding is still debated and needs validation using free-living animals. This study validates that DNA metabarcoding of feces can retrieve actual ingested taxa, and most importantly, that read numbers retrieved from sequencing can also be used to quantify the relative biomass of dietary taxa. Validation was done with the hole-nesting insectivorous Pied Flycatcher whose diet was quantified using camera footage. Size-adjusted counts of food items delivered to nestlings were used as a proxy for provided biomass of prey orders and families, and subsequently, nestling feces were assessed through DNA metabarcoding. To explore potential effects of digestion, gizzard and lower intestine samples of freshly collected birds were subjected to DNA metabarcoding. For metabarcoding with Cytochrome Oxidase subunit I (COI), we modified published invertebrate COI primers LCO1490 and HCO1777, which reduced host reads to 0.03%, and amplified Arachnida DNA without significant changing the recovery of other arthropod taxa. DNA metabarcoding retrieved all commonly camera-recorded taxa. Overall, and in each replicate year (
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