“…While we found no overall clustering among microbial communities at the genus level across health status, Paraclostridium bifermentans was significantly more abundant in oral microbiota of symptomatic chicks compared to other samples. P. bifermentans is an anaerobic pathogen that is associated with septic arthritis, osteomyelitis, inflammatory gastrointestinal disease, endocarditis, brain abscesses and lymphadenitis in humans (Kolander, 1989;Edagiz et al, 2015;Hale et al, 2016;Sankar R et al, 2018;Barrett et al, 2020;Zhao et al, 2022). Clostridial diseases have been known to affect avian hosts (Clark et al, 2010;Lueders et al, 2017;Videvall et al, 2020) including penguins ((Rohrer et al, 2023, and unpublished pathology reports), but it is typically only associated with inflammatory gastrointestinal disease and septic peritonitis.…”