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Data and code from: Trophic niche representation affects macroevolutionary inference: A case study in elapid snakes

Lee, Justin1; McDiarmid, Roy23; Greene, Harry4; Rabosky, Daniel1

Published Aug 04, 2026 on Dryad. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.4tmpg4fsf

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Aug 04, 2026 version files 459.18 KB

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Abstract

Diet is a fundamental component of animal ecology, but its representation is inherently difficult, requiring decisions about what to measure, how to measure, and at what scale food resources should be examined. As a trait, diet is inherently multidimensional and hierarchically structured, as food items can be categorized under a variety of taxonomic, ecological, and functional criteria that may reflect different axes of a trophic niche. These complexities are widely acknowledged yet difficult to implement in evolutionary studies, which tend to employ coarse and univariate categories to represent diet. Here, we use a high-resolution trophic dataset of elapid snakes (Elapidae) to investigate whether comparative analyses are affected by the categorical framework used to represent dietary niches. We found significant differences in inferred trophic niche structure across all major elapid groups and all six diet representation schemes. Some patterns were consistent across analyses, but most were impacted by category schemes, leading to divergent and unpredictable inferences of diet breadth, niche states, and tip rates. Our results emphasize that single, univariate categories that lack hierarchical or relational context may lead to inadequate descriptions of trophic niches. Consequently, we argue that using a combination of approaches for representing animal diets may lead to more biologically robust inferences of dietary evolution. More broadly, our results demonstrate that macroevolutionary analyses can be influenced by the representation schemes used to describe complex ecological and behavioral traits.