Influence of management practice on the microbiota of a critically endangered species: a longitudinal study of kākāpō chick faeces and associated nest litter
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The critically endangered kākāpō is a flightless, nocturnal parrot endemic to Aotearoa New Zealand. Recent efforts to describe the gastrointestinal microbial community of this threatened herbivore revealed a low-diversity microbiota that is often dominated by Escherichia-Shigella bacteria. Given the importance of associated microbial communities to animal health, and increasing appreciation of their potential relevance to threatened species conservation, we sought to better understand the development of this unusual gut microbiota profile. To this end, we conducted a longitudinal analysis of faecal material collected from kākāpō chicks during the 2019 breeding season, in addition to associated nest litter material. RESULTS: Using an experimental approach rarely seen in studies of threatened species microbiota, we evaluated the impact of a regular conservation practice on the developing kākāpō microbiota, namely the removal of faecal material from nests. Artificially removing chick faeces from nests had negligible impact on bacterial community diversity for either chicks or nests (p > 0.05). However, the gut microbiota did change significantly over time as chick age increased (p < 0.01), with an increasing relative abundance of Escherichia-Shigella coli over the study period and similar observations for the associated nest litter microbiota (p < 0.01). Supplementary feeding substantially altered gut bacterial diversity of kākāpō chicks (p < 0.01), characterised by a significant increase in Lactobacillus bacteria. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, chick age and hand rearing conditions had the most marked impact on faecal bacterial communities. Similarly, the surrounding nest litter microbiota changed significantly over time since a kākāpō chick was first placed in the nest, though we found no evidence that removal of faecal material influenced the bacterial communities of either litter or faecal samples. Taken together, these observations will inform ongoing conservation and management of this most enigmatic of bird species.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".