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Título
Diet of the Insular Lizard, Podarcis lilfordi (Günther, 1874): Complementary Morphological and Molecular Approaches
Autor(es)
Materia
Balearic Islands
diet analysis
metabarcoding
morphological identification
trophic ecology
Podarcis
Lacertidae
Clasificación UNESCO
24 Ciencias de la vida
2401.16 Herpetología
2409 Genética
Fecha de publicación
2023
Editor
MDPI
Citación
Alemany, I.; Pérez-Cembranos, A.; Castro, J.A.; Picornell, A.; Pérez-Mellado, V.; Ramon, C. Diet of (2023). The Insular Lizard, Podarcis lilfordi (Günther, 1874): Complementary Morphological and Molecular Approaches. Animals, 13, 507. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani13030507
Resumen
[EN] The diets of insular lizards are extremely varied, depending on the different environmental characteristics of each island population. This is particularly evident in the case of the populations of small coastal islets of the Balearic Islands, where the Balearic lizard, Podarcis lilfordi, is found. The study of trophic ecology carried out by means of traditional tools, such as morphological analysis of feces, has made it possible to detect numerous prey and nutritional elements. However, these methods are clearly insufficient, as some rare groups are not detected. It is also difficult to identify remains of marine subsidies or of foods contributed to these small islands by other predators, such as seabirds. The current study demonstrates the advantages of combining morphological diet analysis with the molecular study of individual feces samples obtained from the same populations. We obtained a greater diversity of prey groups using the combined methodologies, with each method identifying prey items that were not detected using the other method. Particularly, the study of diets at the molecular level identified plant species consumed by lizards that were, occasionally, not identified in morphological analyses. Conversely, the traditional morphological study of an equivalent number of fecal samples allowed for the identification of several prey groups that had not been detected in the molecular study. From this viewpoint, the advantages and disadvantages of each methodology are discussed.
URI
ISSN
2076-2615
DOI
10.3390/ani13030507
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