Table 1.
Primers used in this study.
Figure 1.
Abundance distribution of the P6 loop sequences at different taxonomic levels.
"< family": sequences identified at a finer taxonomic resolution than the family, "family": sequences identified at the family level only, "> family": sequences that could not be identified up to the family level. N = 5488 unique sequences longer than 10 bp and with occurrence higher or equal to 11.
Table 2.
Number of sequences assembled by NGS of vegetal DNA extracted from tapir faeces (N = 39, 79×60 mg of faecal product), using plant universal primers targeting the P6 loop region of the trnL (UAA) intron and primers specific for the Sapotaceae family, targeting the first internal transcribed spacer (ITS1) of nuclear ribosomal DNA.
Figure 2.
Accumulation curves of plant richness in the sampled tapir dung piles using the P6 loop marker.
a) Cumulated richness of the plant DNA sequences (P6 loop), b) Cumulated richness of the identified plant families.
Figure 3.
Total abundances and frequencies of the P6 loop sequences of the most abundant plant taxa identified in the sampled tapir dung piles.
a) Identified families; b) Identified genera. Figures into brackets indicate the number of different sequences per taxon.
Table 3.
List of plant taxa identified in 39 tapir dung of the Nouragues Reserve using the ITS markers.
Figure 4.
Box plot of the richness per month of the trnL P6 loop plant sequences (length > 10 bp) detected in the tapir dung piles, using unsorted samples.
The figures on top indicate the number of samples per month.
Figure 5.
Results of the between-class analysis of the presence-absence table of the identified plant genera in the tapir dung piles between the months of sample collection.
a) Correlation circle of the plant genera in the two first axes of the BCA; b) Distribution of the dung samples in the first plan of the BCA. The mesh of the grid is 2. The ellipses circumscribe the dung samples for each month. They are centred on the barycentres and the length of the ellipse axes equal to 1.5 time the standard deviation of the coordinates of the projections of the points (samples) on the BCA axes.
Table 4.
Correlation between the sequence (P6 loop trnL) occurrence and the mean monthly abundance of macroscopic fruit residuals of the same genus found in the same dung piles.