I am from Southern California and received my Bachelor’s degree from the University of Redlands. I am deeply interested in desert animals, particularly in understanding what adaptations facilitate their persistence in in some of the harshest environments on Earth. I joined the Dearing lab in 2018 to continue my studies on desert animal adaptations. For my dissertation research I am using comparative genomics and gut microbial inventorying to identify the adaptations that facilitate the persistence of woodrats (Neotoma spp.) in the Mojave Desert. In my free time I enjoy hiking, camping, riding my Jetski, PC gaming, and cooking.
The gut microbiome plays a crucial role in the nutritional ecology of mammalian herbivores, yet studies in nature often rely on fecal samples from a single time period to inventory gut microbial communities. Although we know that environmental variables such as diet and season can impact the stability of the microbiome, we have little understanding of whether these communities vary within an individual overtime, particularly in natural setting. To test the temporal stability of the gut microbiome at the individual level, we marked and recaptured Bryant’s woodrats (Neotoma bryanti) in the Mojave Desert. We inventoried the gut microbial community of each individual with 16s rRNA gene sequencing and used plant metabarcoding for diet quantification across 2 years of sampling. We found that a population of woodrats experience large shifts in the most abundant microbial families over time, especially during periods of change in foraging behavior. Additionally, we found that individuals experience significant turnover in gut microbiome composition over time, even in as little as eight weeks. These results demonstrate that host influence and diet can have significant influence on gut microbiome structure, and repeated sampling may be needed to accurately characterize the gut microbiome of natural populations.