DNA metabarcoding reveals that coyotes in New York City consume wide variety of native prey species and human food

PeerJ

article

Carol S. Henger¹  Emily Hargous¹  Christopher M. Nagy²  Mark Weckel³  Claudia Wultsch³  Konstantinos Krampis⁴  Neil Duncan³  Linda Gormezano³  Jason Munshi-South¹ 

[1] Louis Calder Biological Field Station, Fordham University;Mianus River Gorge;American Museum of Natural History;Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics Laboratory, City University of New York, Hunter College;Department of Biological Sciences, City University of New York, Hunter College;Institute of Computational Biomedicine, Weill Medical College of Cornell University

关键词: DNA metabarcoding;    Coyotes;    Diet;    New York City;    Urbanization;    Noninvasive genetic sampling;   

DOI  :  10.7717/peerj.13788

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Inra

【 摘 要 】

Carnivores are currently colonizing cities where they were previously absent. These urban environments are novel ecosystems characterized by habitat degradation and fragmentation, availability of human food, and different prey assemblages than surrounding areas. Coyotes (Canis latrans) established a breeding population in New York City (NYC) over the last few decades, but their ecology within NYC is poorly understood. In this study, we used non-invasive scat sampling and DNA metabarcoding to profile vertebrate, invertebrate, and plant dietary items with the goal to compare the diets of urban coyotes to those inhabiting non-urban areas. We found that both urban and non-urban coyotes consumed a variety of plants and animals as well as human food. Raccoons (Procyon lotor) were an important food item for coyotes within and outside NYC. In contrast, white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) were mainly eaten by coyotes inhabiting non-urban areas. Domestic chicken (Gallus gallus) was the human food item found in most scats from both urban and non-urban coyotes. Domestic cats (Felis catus) were consumed by urban coyotes but were detected in only a small proportion of the scats (<5%), which differs markedly from high rates of cat depredation in some other cities. In addition, we compared our genetic metabarcoding analysis to a morphological analysis of the same scat samples. We found that the detection similarity between the two methods was low and it varied depending on the type of diet item.

【 授权许可】

CC BY