Is fast food harming the gut health of seagulls? We could be about to find out

A brand new study looking at the impact of fast food on the gut health of seagulls has just won funding from the Royal Society.

University of Salford academic Dr Alice Risely will research the bacteria carried by gulls from different habitats and how it has changed due to diet. She has won £30,000 research grant from the Royal Society for the work.

Dr Risely, a Research and Teaching Fellow at the University, is seeking to investigate gene sharing within wildlife microbiomes, which could help create plans to mitigate the risks of diseases and  antimicrobial resistance being spread between humans and wildlife.

Within the study entitled ‘The Role of Anthropogenic Microbiomes in Driving Horizontal Gene Transfer and Bacterial Pathogen Evolution in Wildlife’, the research will test whether urban diets increase the potential for pathogen evolution in wildlife.

The investigation will focus on fast food and its impact on gulls’ gut bacteria – whether gulls that regularly eat human fast food carry more dangerous bacteria than gulls that stick to a traditional coastal diet.

Dr Alice Risely said: “This study will examine if there is a connection between gull diet and how their gut bacteria evolve. High fat diets, like those associated with frequent fast-food consumption, may create stressful conditions for gut microbes. In response, bacteria can develop harmful traits that allow them to cause disease”.

While such infections might not seriously harm the gulls themselves, they could enable urban gulls to spread more dangerous microbes between cafes, towns and even countries as they travel during migration.

Testing the theory in Lesser black-backed gulls, a species which forages and nests in both natural and urban environments, the study is set to play in important role in investigating the spread of harmful genes relevant to public health between wildlife, livestock and humans.

To understand whether diet is driving these changes, Dr Risely will use advanced DNA sequencing technologies to analyse the complete genomes of gut bacteria from juvenile gulls. These chicks are fed either urban food sources or traditional coastal diets by their parents, providing a natural comparison between the two feeding strategies.

Additionally, she will grow selected bacteria strains in the laboratory and run nutritional experiments to test how high-fat diets affect their capacity to share genes, such as those involved in anti-microbial resistance. This will help determine whether urban diets themselves, rather than other factors such as the gulls’ immune systems or patterns of bacterial transmission, directly promote bacteria to evolve more pathogenic genetic traits.

By better understanding how urban diets affect the health of animals like gulls, the team hope to identify solutions that benefit both people and wildlife, ensuring that our towns and cities remain biodiverse whilst also protecting both wildlife and human health.