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| Ornamentation and body condition but not glucocorticoids, predict wild songbird microbiome characteristics |
| Morgan C. Slevin1, Jennifer L. Houtz2,3, Maren N. Vitousek2, Daniel T. Baldassarre4, Rindy C. Anderson1. 1Florida Atlantic University, Davie, Florida, United States; 2Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, United States; 3Allegheny College, Meadville, Pennsylvania, United States; 4State University of New York - Oswego, Oswego, New York, United States |
Animal populations can exhibit dramatic variation in individual fitness, and microbiota are emerging as a potentially understudied factor. Bacterial diversity and community structure of microbiomes associate with many aspects of fitness in animals, but we know relatively little about the generality of these relationships in wild populations and non-mammalian taxa. We sampled the cloacal, oral, and fecal microbiomes of wild Northern Cardinals (Cardinalis cardinalis) to test for relationships between the microbiota and host demographics and several traits that often correlate with host fitness. Alpha and beta bacterial diversity were predicted by variation in body condition and several sexual ornaments, but not glucocorticoid concentrations. Diversity and community structure varied between microbiome regions and by sex, season, and age. Documenting these baseline relationships in a free-living songbird population supports a growing body of science linking avian host fitness to internal bacterial community characteristics, setting the stage for developing manipulative experiments to determine the impact of how challenges to fitness may upset these relationships. |