Impacts of Captivity in the Gut Microbiota of Andean Bears
The Andean bear is an endemic species of the tropical Andes with a mostly exclusively plant-based diet. Their lack of herbivory adaptations leads to a fragile gut microbiota heavily impacted by the diet. Current captivity-associated diets for Andean bears fall short in fully satisfy their nutritional needs. Our goal was to study the captivity-driven changes in the gut microbiota of Andean bears and its development on wild-caught cubs fed with a captivity diet. Fecal samples from wild, permanently captive and wild-caught/captive-raised cubs were collected; amplicon libraries of the V4-16S rDNA gene were sequenced using the Illumina MiSeq platform. Sequences were cleaned, paired-ends assembled and OTUs assignment, diversity and statistical analyses were performed using QIIME 1.9.1, R and PRIMER-E. We found that captive bears harbor a less diverse and taxonomically distinct gut microbiota. Although a large core of 469 OTUs was present in all the samples, only wild individuals exhibit a specialized set of unique OTUs...