After years of work, I'm thrilled to announce our new open-access paper looking at seasonal changes in the diet and microbiome of black rhino🦏 and Grevy’s zebra🦓, and impact on breeding success

🧵below on the results and implications for conservation

nature.com/articles/s4200…

You can also find a less technical summary of this work, focusing on the diet aspects, in this blog

Keep scrolling for the 🧵with lots of rhino and zebra photos

communities.springernature.com/posts/eating-s…

Context!

When species have undergone range declines, we can only study them in the parts of their historical range where they still exist. This risks a ‘species stereotype’ where we misunderstand which habitats are best for survivorship and breeding

sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

We can’t study extirpated populations, and the environment is changing rapidly, so a primary challenge for conservation is to develop evidence-based relationships between ecological conditions 🌱, individual fitness 🪺 and demographic heterogeneity⬆️⬇️ across space and time

Diet is a key aspect of habitat suitability, but seasonal dietary changes are understudied. Longitudinal studies on diet switching between lean and plentiful periods across ecological gradients can be used to reveal dietary preferences and the impact of different diets on fitness

Optimal foraging theory (OFT) can be used to predict how herbivores in different guilds should change their diets seasonally between preferred and fallback foods

Changes in diet have knock-on effects on the gut microbiome 🦠 that performs key functional roles. The cost of switching hypothesis suggests that digestion is less efficient when the microbiome community is in flux as the microbiome becomes temporarily mismatched with diet

Methods!

Using dung sampling 💩 and DNA metabarcoding we studied two Kenyan IUCN Red List Critically Endangered savanna herbivores with different foraging strategies; the eastern black rhino (Diceros bicornis michaeli) and Grevy’s zebra (Equus grevyi)