Meeting Abstract
Sea turtles consume both plant and animal prey and there is significant variation in diet composition among species and life stages. Visual inspection of gut contents is an effective but very time-consuming approach, which becomes increasingly difficult with digestive breakdown. Therefore, the objective of our current work is to optimize and validate the use of DNA metabarcoding techniques for characterizing sea turtle diet alongside visual inspections. Here we present results from testing multiple metabarcoding primer pairs with diet samples collected from turtles stranded off the coast of Florida. We tested a panel of animal- and plant-specific primer pairs, targeting multiple genomic regions (e.g., CO1, 18S, TrnL), for effective PCR amplification. Our goal was to maximize diversity of diet items detectable by Illumina sequencing of amplicon libraries. Although metabarcoding primers are referred to as being universal, each primer pair will have biases against certain taxa. Thus, it is critical to establish an appropriate suite of primers to capture the best representation of true diet composition. Results from this work contribute rigorous methods and critical baseline data to inform our ongoing studies of sea turtle diet in the context of life history, ecology, and disease dynamics.
