Undergraduate Research: An Archive - 2021 Program

Luca Kuziel ’21
ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY
Certificate in Environmental Studies; Senior
Thesis Research Funding Awardee
THESIS TITLE
Mind the (Phylogenetic)
Gap: Exploring the
Routes through
Ungulate Intestines of
Passenger and Resident
Fungi
ADVISER
Robert Pringle,
Associate Professor of
Ecology and
Evolutionary Biology
What animals eat and how they digest it is
important information for conservation efforts.
More generally, understanding the factors that
drive community composition at all levels, from
megaherbivores in a savanna to microbes in a
gut, is poorly understood. Fungi in diets and
microbiomes are understudied despite their
potential importance to the livestock industry
and its efforts to reduce methane emissions, as
well as the importance of symbiotic relationships
between many fungal and plant species to
ecosystem health. My thesis investigated the
fungal components of the diets and microbiomes
of five mammalian herbivores and one omnivore
from six locations in East and Southern Africa.
While fungal libraries are incomplete, we were
able to uncover unexpected locational variation
in both the diets and microbiomes. Phylogenetic
factors also helped explain variation in our data,
but to a lesser extent. We also were surprised to
find very few large mushrooms in our data.
BIODIVERSITY AND
CONSERVATION
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