Estimate diets & calibration coefficients

What is it about?

Knowledge of predator diets provides essential insights into their ecology at scales ranging from individual animals to communities, though diet estimation is challenging and remains an active area of research in quantitative ecology. Quantitative fatty acid signature analysis (QFASA) has become a popular method of estimating diets. A key assumption of QFASA is that constants called “calibration coefficients”, which are used to adjust for the differential metabolism of fatty acids by predators while estimating diets, are known. In practice, however, calibration coefficients have been estimated using captive animals fed known diets, experiments which are expensive to conduct and may raise concerns regarding animal welfare. The impossibility of verifying the accuracy of feeding-trial calibration coefficients to estimate the diets of free-ranging predators has been widely criticized. In this manuscript, we extend the original QFASA model in a way that allows both diet composition and calibration coefficients to be estimated only from fatty acid signature samples from predators and potential prey types.

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Why is it important?

The breakthrough presented in this paper is expected to radically change the practice of diet estimation with fatty acid data. This is the sixth in a series of papers on diet estimation methods using fatty acid signature data.