Analysing DNA inside the guts of dung beetles could provide a useful way to monitor endangered lemur populations in Madagascar.
at the Finnish Museum of Natural History in Helsinki and his colleagues captured dozens of beetles from three forests in central and northern Madagascar to determine what dung they were feeding on.
They collected four different species of dung beetle in small, baited pitfall traps, then euthanised and dissected them.
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Using sequencing technology, the team members fished out all the bits of mammal DNA from recently eaten dung that they could find inside the beetles鈥� guts.
As expected, the researchers found the beetles now mainly eat human faeces and cattle dung.听But they were encouraged to see that the insects were also still eating the dung of lemurs.
They could identify the DNA of six different lemur species, including the critically endangered diademed sifaka (Propithecus diadema).
The study demonstrates that Madagascar鈥檚 dung beetles, of which there are around 300 species, could be used as 鈥渂iodiversity indicators鈥� to track lemurs and assess environmental quality, says Tarasov.
The pitfall traps capture dozens, if not hundreds, of beetles in a single night and are potentially a cheaper and more effective means of gathering data than camera traps, he adds.
鈥淚t would be super good if, using this technique, we can assess not only the presence of lemurs 鈥� that there is a particular species in this particular locality 鈥� but also, for example, the population size of lemurs by the concentration of their DNA [inside the guts of dung beetles],鈥� says Tarasov.
Studying the gut DNA of beetles collected and kept in natural history museums around the world could also shed light on how the composition of mammal populations has changed over time in Madagascar or elsewhere, says Tarasov, including in forests that have since been cleared.
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