Shedding new light on the diet of Norwegian lemmings: DNA metabarcoding of stomach content

Abstract

21Lemmings are key herbivores in many arctic food webs and their population dynamics have

Sources of variation in small rodent trophic niche: new insights from DNA metabarcoding and stable isotope analysis

“…We included these into the analyses as groups of 'mosses' and 'ferns and allies'. A substantial part of the diet of L. lemmus is composed of mosses, but this component of its diet consists rather uniformly of the genus Dicranum [74]. We could, therefore, assume that most variation in the species diet occurs within the seed plant component and hence did not include a more comprehensive analysis of mosses in this study.…”

“…One explanation of such differences is that the impact of competition on herbivore diet is likely influenced by the degree of specialisation of the herbivores. For example, lemmings have in general more specialised feeding habits than voles [16,37,74]. Consequently, they may experience exploitation competition, causing a diversification of diet, at population densities which would not impact the TNW of voles.…”

“…The effect of habitat niche expansion on TNW is, however, likely to differ between small rodent populations based on the similarity of plant species pools between habitats. For example, the most important vascular plant food item of L. lemmus in the Finnmark study area is the grass Avenella flexuosa [74]. This grass species is abundant in both heath and meadow habitats [87], and thus L. lemmus probably faces comparatively little need to adjust its diet when moving between these habitats.…”

Tree diversity and species identity effects on soil fungi, protists and animals are context dependent

“…The cytochrome I oxidase gene, the standard barcode for animals, has proven to be suboptimal for metabarcoding analyses owing to problems with primer coverage and large DNA insertions in certain taxa (for example, Creer et al, 2010;de Wit and Erseus, 2010;Deagle et al, 2014;Zhan et al, 2014). It has been outlined that multiple taxonomic groups should be addressed simultaneously for better documenting their relative abundance (Soininen et al, 2013) and understanding of ecological and biogeographic processes (Coleman, 2009;Soininen, 2014). For these reasons, the small subunit (SSU) of ribosomal DNA has been targeted following traditions in microbiology and kingdomlevel phylogenetics (Bik et al, 2012).…”

Rodent population dynamics affect seedling recruitment in alpine habitats

“…On the other hand, lichens are non‐preferred forage and likely unaffected by rodent herbivory (Virtanen ; Soininen et al. ), but could be affected by trampling. Depending on habitat productivity (Suding & Goldberg ) and litter amount (Loydi et al.…”