Meeting Abstract
Recent years have seen a surge of research on the link between an individual’s cognitive ability and its gut microbiome. With recent advances in understanding avian cognition, songbirds are an ideal system for investigating this relationship. In a captive Zebra Finch (Taeniopygia guttata) population of 42 adults, I quantified individual variation in performance on cognitive tasks (novel foraging, color association, and color reversal) that measure motor learning and memory, recording the number of trials needed to pass each task and error rate per trial. I sampled the gut microbiome via cloacal swab immediately prior to testing, sequenced the bacterial taxa present, and assessed diversity and relative abundance in each sample using Qiime2. There was high individual variation in cognitive performance, ranging from 22 to 80 trials needed to complete all three tasks (mean = 15.1 ± 1.4 trials for novel foraging, 9.4 ± 0.8 for color association, and 16.2 ± 0.9 for color reversal), with no sex difference for any task (all P > 0.18). Color association and reversal performance were correlated (r = 0.3, P = 0.03), but neither task was correlated with novel foraging performance (r = -0.02, P = 0.9). Finally, the slope of the per-trial error rate over the course of each color task was significantly correlated with the number of trials needed to complete the task (r = 0.4, P = 0.003). I will relate each bird’s cognitive performance to its microbiome characteristics to test for evidence of a gut-brain axis. Our results from this model songbird species will build a foundation for future research, including understanding the microbiome during critical developmental stages (e.g., song learning) and in wild populations.
