Survival during brooding and winter periods can be critical for assessing factors influencing lesser prairie-chicken (LEPC, Tympanuchus pallidicinctus) population growth rates. Food may be particularly important during these periods. During the brooding period, rapidly growing LEPC chicks have high calorie demands and are restricted to foodstuffs within their immediate surroundings. During cold winters, meeting thermoregulatory demands on available food items of limited nutrient content may be challenging. Therefore, our objective was to determine the primary animal and plant components of LEPC diets among native prairie, cropland, and Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) fields in Kansas and Colorado during brooding and winter using a DNA barcoding approach. LEPC fecal samples (n = 314) were collected during the summer of 2014 and winter of 2014-2015, labeled, frozen, and DNA was extracted. Sequences were classified to Order for invertebrates and Genus for plants based on the best matching barcode. To determine species consumed, sequences of the cytochrome oxidase I (COI) gene was used for animals and the trnl plastid region was used for plants. Among 80 readable fecal samples for invertebrates, 35% of the sequences were from Lepidoptera, 26% from Orthoptera, 14% from Araneae, and 13% from Hemiptera. Plant sequences from 137 fecal samples were comprised of Ambrosia spp. (28%) followed by species in genera similar to Symphyotrichum (10%), Medicago (6%), and Triticum (5%). The predominant use of Lepidopteran prey contrasts with past research for which Orthopterans were the main dietary component.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.