New paper!

Big CONGRATULATIONS to Soma, who did her Masters research here at CSIRO in collaboration with the Schwessinger lab at ANU. Her first author paper has just been published at PeerJ.

We compared the types of bacteria found in poop between rabbits and hares, living in a periurban nature reserve in Canberra. This could provide insights into how rabbits and hares use and interact with the environment differently, for example, highlighting differences in their diets. We also compared our findings with a previous study that looked at poop bacteria from hares in Europe, their native home range. We found that rabbits had more diverse and variable poop bacteria than hares, which may be indicative of less discriminate foraging behaviour in rabbits. This in turn may enable them to adapt quicker to new environments. We also found different bacteria present in European hares that were not present in Australian hares. But we don’t yet know exactly what this means.

For more information, you can read the full paper here: https://peerj.com/articles/9564/