Affiliations 

  • 1 School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK
  • 2 Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
  • 3 Institute for Tropical Biology and Conservation, Universiti Malaysia Sabah, Jalan UMS, Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia
  • 4 Institut Systématique Evolution Biodiversité (ISYEB), Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, CNRS, Sorbonne Université, EPHE, Paris Cedex, France
Mol Ecol Resour, 2019 Jan;19(1):105-117.
PMID: 30225935 DOI: 10.1111/1755-0998.12943

Abstract

The application of high-throughput sequencing (HTS) for metabarcoding of mixed samples offers new opportunities in conservation biology. Recently, the successful detection of prey DNA from the guts of leeches has raised the possibility that these, and other blood-feeding invertebrates, might serve as useful samplers of mammals. Yet little is known about whether sympatric leech species differ in their feeding preferences, and whether this has a bearing on their relative suitability for monitoring local mammalian diversity. To address these questions, we collected spatially matched samples of two congeneric leech species Haemadipsa picta and Haemadipsa sumatrana from lowland rainforest in Borneo. For each species, we pooled ~500 leeches into batches of 10 individuals, performed PCR to target a section of the mammalian 16S rRNA locus and undertook sequencing of amplicon libraries using an Illumina MiSeq. In total, we identified sequences from 14 mammalian genera, spanning nine families and five orders. We found greater numbers of detections, and higher diversity of OTUs, in H. picta compared with H. sumatrana, with rodents only present in the former leech species. However, comparison of samples from across the landscape revealed no significant difference in mammal community composition between the leech species. We therefore suggest that H. picta is the more suitable iDNA sampler in this degraded Bornean forest. We conclude that the choice of invertebrate sampler can influence the detectability of different mammal groups and that this should be accounted for when designing iDNA studies.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.