Diet Analysis of Hawai'i Island's Blackburnia hawaiiensis (Coleoptera: Carabidae) using Stable Isotopes and High-Throughput Sequencing

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2-10-2021

Publication Title

Pacific Science

Volume

74

Issue

3

First page number:

245

Last page number:

256

Abstract

© This article was created by a U.S. government employee and is in the Public Domain. Public Domain information may be freely distributed and copied, but it is requested that in any subsequent use the U.S. Department of Interior U.S. Geological Survey and the journal, Pacific Science, be given appropriate acknowledgment. Determining the diet of arthropods can be difficult due to their small size and complex food webs, especially in Hawai'i, where knowledge of arthropod predator-prey interactions is sparse. The diet of the Hawai'i Island-endemic carabid beetle, Blackburnia hawaiiensis Sharp (Coleoptera: Carabidae) is of particular interest because of its peculiar arboreal behavior and metathoracic flight wings. Our study objective was to determine the diet of B. hawaiiensis in replicated, geographically separated locations by using two different yet complementary laboratory techniques: natural abundance stable isotope analysis (SIA) and high-throughput sequencing (HTS). Overall, B. hawaiiensis had a greater average I15N and similar I13C compared to the other arthropods sampled in this study and HTS data revealed Diptera and Lepidoptera sequences in the beetle's gut contents. These results are consistent with B. hawaiiensis being classified as a generalist predator. The combination of SIA and HTS are important methods for determining the diet of species within complex food webs, particularly for species that are difficult to observe in nature.

Keywords

B. hawaiiensis; Carabid; Food web; Hawai'i; Metabarcoding

Disciplines

Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Language

English

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