Honorable Mention: King with the Crimson Crest

Photo by Morgan Slevin, graduate student Charles E. Schmidt College of Science

This male Northern Cardinal’s bright orange beak, beautiful red feathers, and even its complex song that wakes me up some mornings, may tell a lot about its quality as an individual because ornaments like these and can tell a story about what’s going on under the hood. But while we know quite a lot about how these traits signal a bird’s health, virtually nothing is known about how they relate to a bird’s gut microbiome, which is the community of bacteria that naturally live in the intestines of every animal, including we humans. My research is dedicated to testing for this relationship between microbiome characteristics and a bird’s health, which can ultimately help us understand how our own human gut microbiome relate to health too, and in the sample collection process I have the unique privilege of observing the natural beauty of my study subjects, like this Northern Cardinal.