Dissecting wombats’ intestines isn’t the easiest way to get an idea about what’s happening with their gut microbiomes, yet that’s what University of Adelaide postdoc Raphael Eisenhofer and his colleagues did for a recent study. Collecting poop would have been easier—particularly for endangered species like wombats—but the researchers wanted more information than they could glean from a stool sample.
“We’ve been using feces for quite a long time now because they’re very easy to get, but what we know about microbial ecology is it’s all about location—where the microbes are in the interface of the host,” Eisenhofer explains.
He and his coauthors characterized the microbial biogeography, or the spatial information about what microbes are present where, of the gastrointestinal (GI) tracts of one bare-nosed wombat (Vombatus ursinus) and one southern hairy-nosed wombat (Lasiorhinus latifrons). Eisenhofer acknowledges the limitations of using just two wombats, yet the team still found some surprises.
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