Delineating reef fish trophic guilds with global gut content data synthesis and phylogeny

Understanding species' roles in food webs requires an accurate assessment of their trophic niche. However, it is challenging to delineate potential trophic interactions across an ecosystem, and a paucity of empirical information often leads to inconsistent definitions of trophic guilds based on expert opinion, especially when applied to hyperdiverse ecosystems. Using coral reef fishes as a model group, we show that experts disagree on the assignment of broad trophic guilds for more than 20% of species, which hampers comparability across studies. Here, we propose a quantitative, unbiased, and reproducible approach to define trophic guilds and apply recent advances in machine learning to predict probabilities of pairwise trophic interactions with high accuracy. We synthesize data from community-wide gut content analyses of tropical coral reef fishes worldwide, resulting in diet information from 13,961 individuals belonging to 615 reef fish. We then use network analysis to identify 8 trophic guilds and Bayesian phylogenetic modeling to show that trophic guilds can be predicted based on phylogeny and maximum body size. Finally, we use machine learning to test whether pairwise trophic interactions can be predicted with accuracy. Our models achieved a misclassification error of less than 5%, indicating that our approach results in a quantitative and reproducible trophic categorization scheme, as well as high-resolution probabilities of trophic interactions. By applying our framework to the most diverse vertebrate consumer group, we show that it can be applied to other organismal groups to advance reproducibility in trait-based ecology. Our work thus provides a viable approach to account for the complexity of predator-prey interactions in highly diverse ecosystems.Peer reviewe

Congruent trophic pathways underpin global coral reef food webs

Ecological interactions uphold ecosystem structure and functioning. However, as species richness increases, the number of possible interactions rises exponentially. More than 6,000 species of coral reef fishes exist across the world's tropical oceans, resulting in an almost innumerable array of possible trophic interactions. Distilling general patterns in these interactions across different bioregions stands to improve our understanding of the processes that govern coral reef functioning. Here, we show that across bioregions, tropical coral reef food webs exhibit a remarkable congruence in their trophic interactions. Specifically, by compiling and investigating the structure of six coral reef food webs across distinct bioregions, we show that when accounting for consumer size and resource availability, these food webs share more trophic interactions than expected by chance. In addition, coral reef food webs are dominated by dietary specialists, which makes trophic pathways vulnerable to biodiversity loss. Prey partitioning among these specialists is geographically consistent, and this pattern intensifies when weak interactions are disregarded. Our results suggest that energy flows through coral reef communities along broadly comparable trophic pathways. Yet, these critical pathways are maintained by species with narrow, specialized diets, which threatens the existence of coral reef functioning in the face of biodiversity loss