Evolution of degrees of carnivory and dietary specialization across Mammalia and their effects on speciation

Abstract

AO_SCPLOWBSTRACTC_SCPLOWConflation between omnivory and dietary generalism limits ecological and evolutionary analyses of diet, including estimating contributions to speciation and diversification. Additionally, categorizing species into qualitative dietary classes leads to information loss in these analyses. Here, we constructed two continuous variables - degree of carnivory (i.e., the position along the continuum from complete herbivory to complete carnivory) and degree of dietary specialization (i.e., the number and variety of food resources utilized) - to elucidate their histories across Mammalia, and to tease out their independent contributions to mammalian speciation. We observed that degree of carnivory significantly affected speciation rate across Mammalia, whereas dietary specialization did not. We further considered phylogenetic level in diet-dependent speciation and saw that degree of carnivory significantly affected speciation in ungulates, carnivorans, bats, eulipotyphlans, and marsupials, while the effect of dietary specialization was only significant in carnivorans. Across Mammalia, omnivores had the lowest speciation rates. Our analyses using two different categorical diet variables led to contrasting signals of diet-dependent diversification, and subsequently different conclusions regarding diets macroevolutionary role. We argue that treating variables such as diet as continuous instead of categorical reduces information loss and avoids the problem of contrasting macroevolutionary signals caused by differential discretization of biologically continuous traits.