One man’s junco is another man’s bird research treasure at Wichita State

It was four years ago that microbiologist Mark Schneegurt and his scientist partners began catching little finches in big nets.

Catching those cute birds may have a big impact on science, agriculture and the future.

The bird they sought? The dark-eyed junco, a sweet-looking little guy weighing 17 to 22 grams, less than an ounce, smaller and thinner than the common house sparrow.

Juncos winter in Wichita and farther south. Bird watchers all over North America love them.

But when the scientists caught juncos at their Wichita State University Biological Field Station on the Ninnescah River, Schneegurt and Chris Rogers plucked the belly feathers. They knocked microbes off the feathers and put them in a Petri dish. And they watched what grew.

Before they did this, Schneegurt said, no one had looked deep, in an organized way, at what grows on birds.

Schneegurt presented WSU’s findings May 31 at the general meeting of the American Society for Microbiology, in New Orleans. He told them what they found should intrigue us for years to come.

And maybe worry us a little.

Potential pathogens

The Petri dish colonies showed a vast, complex world, interactive and mostly unknown.

“The greatest diversity of bacteria ever found on wild birds,” Rogers said.

“And we saw some plant bacteria known to be deadly to plants,” Schneegurt said.

This got their attention immediately.

Neither Schneegurt nor Rogers say they’ve discovered something specifically dangerous. Because a bird carries a pathogen dangerous to some plants does not mean it always deposits that pathogen on a plant or that that pathogen is always infectious, Rogers said.

“We have to be careful about what we say just yet,” Schneegurt said.

Science needs to be specific to be useful, he said. If they see a dangerous pathogen, did they find it in the feather or on the feather? Or was it growing on a speck of dust on the feather?

“We have no idea what the net effect of potential pathogens and good bacteria would be on wheat,” Rogers wrote in an e-mail. “For all we know, juncos are beneficial, not harmful.

“We need further study; we don’t even know if juncos carry bacteria that can be infectious, despite their classification as pathogenic.”

But some of the microbes and the interactions they saw, Schneegurt said, “previous studies haven’t seen these at all.”

Habitat worries

Here’s where things get really interesting, Rogers said.

The junco can fly 200 miles in one night. They migrate from Alaska to Texas.

Part of the scientists’ study was to see whether anything about this vast interaction is changing.

The junco’s winter habitat is being degraded, Rogers wrote, “probably by loss of fence rows and woodlands along rivers in the prairie.”

“So by such activities of intensified agriculture, we cause them to select suboptimal habitats.”

Wheat fields, he said.

In other words, he said, habitat destruction may be forcing the junco into farm fields, where they might be shedding plant pathogens onto the plants we depend on.

Microbes necessary

The world’s environment would do fine if humans disappeared, Schneegurt said. But planetary catastrophe would ensue if the microbes die.

Fantastic creatures, Schneegurt called them.

“Some of them breathe rock,” Schneegurt said. “Some of them eat rock.”

The nitrogen that nourishes plants? The carbon cycle that creates the raw material of living things? All made possible by microbes.

They are key, he said, to “how soils function. How much water is held in soils. How nutrients and chemicals work together in the plant-growing process. How everything in the environment is broken down.”

Microbes function inside and outside us and with all of nature “in an intimate way.”

The human body alone, with its billions of cells, carries about 10 times more microbes than it has cells, he said.

They digest much of our food in our gut, he said. If you swallow antibiotics, Schneegurt said, you kill millions of creatures that keep you healthy.

And in every gram of junco feathers, there can be at least a million microscopic creatures lazing around, eating and multiplying.

“And it’s really hard to say that it’s only that many,” Schneegurt said.

“Those were only the ones we were able to grow, and we know we grow only a fraction of what might be in there. The real number per gram of feathers might be 100 or 1,000 times greater than that.”

Most are harmless, even beneficial. There are plant microbes that kill fungi dangerous to plants. Others stimulate plant growth.

But some microbes that Schneegurt and Rogers saw are known to be dangerous to some plants.

What got their attention also was the realization, as Rogers said, that there are important interactions between birds, animals, microbes, plants and the humans who live among them.

Few people have studied how those interactions might play out. And here we are as humans, Rogers said, changing bird habitats.

Impact unknown

The destruction of the planet’s natural habitats for the junco and other birds is driving these little seed eaters out of their natural tree habitats and into fields, where the juncos and other birds then shake off millions of little creatures onto the leaves and stems and roots we eat.

Could this be bad?

No one knows yet, Rogers said.

“And that’s not good.”

The scientists who will now build on WSU’s work and begin taking a much closer look at bird microbes may find many things beneficial.

“There may end up being many commercial applications,” Rogers said.

But we need to look for dangers. And try to head them off, he said.

“To solve the problem potentially, we can provide habitat in the form of restored fence rows and woodlands along rivers,” Rogers wrote.

“We don’t know what might be happening,” he said. “And we should find out.”

This story was originally published June 14, 2015 at 9:08 PM with the headline "One man’s junco is another man’s bird research treasure at Wichita State."