Hubbard, Alan and Franco-Trecu, Valentina and Drago, Massimiliano and Riet-Sapriza, Federico G. and Parnell, Andrew and Frau, Rosina and Inchausti, Pablo (2013) Bias in Diet Determination: Incorporating Traditional Methods in Bayesian Mixing Models. PLoS ONE, 8 (11). pp. 1-8. ISSN 1932-6203

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Abstract

There are not “universal methods” to determine diet composition of predators. Most traditional methods are biased because of their reliance on differential digestibility and the recovery of hard items. By relying on assimilated food, stable isotope and Bayesian mixing models (SIMMs) resolve many biases of traditional methods. SIMMs can incorporate prior information (i.e. proportional diet composition) that may improve the precision in the estimated dietary composition. However few studies have assessed the performance of traditional methods and SIMMs with and without informative priors to study the predators’ diets. Here we compare the diet compositions of the South American fur seal and sea lions obtained by scats analysis and by SIMMs-UP (uninformative priors) and assess whether informative priors (SIMMs-IP) from the scat analysis improved the estimated diet composition compared to SIMMs-UP. According to the SIMM-UP, while pelagic species dominated the fur seal’s diet the sea lion’s did not have a clear dominance of any prey. In contrast, SIMM-IP’s diets compositions were dominated by the same preys as in scat analyses. When prior information influenced SIMMs’ estimates, incorporating informative priors improved the precision in the estimated diet composition at the risk of inducing biases in the estimates. If preys isotopic data allow discriminating preys’ contributions to diets, informative priors should lead to more precise but unbiased estimated diet composition. Just as estimates of diet composition obtained from traditional methods are critically interpreted because of their biases, care must be exercised when interpreting diet composition obtained by SIMMs-IP. The best approach to obtain a near-complete view of predators’ diet composition should involve the simultaneous consideration of different sources of partial evidence (traditional methods, SIMM-UP and SIMM-IP) in the light of natural history of the predator species so as to reliably ascertain and weight the information yielded by each method.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	Bias; Diet Determination; Traditional Methods; Bayesian Mixing Models;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Science and Engineering > Mathematics and Statistics Faculty of Science and Engineering > Research Institutes > Hamilton Institute Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Institutes > Irish Climate Analysis and Research Units, ICARUS
Item ID:	19118
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0080019
Depositing User:	Andrew Parnell
Date Deposited:	29 Oct 2024 16:03
Journal or Publication Title:	PLoS ONE
Publisher:	Public Library of Science
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	Publisher
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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