Data from: Temporal activity patterns of predators and prey across broad geographic scales

Predators and prey are locked in an evolutionary arms race that shapes
their behaviour and life history. Predators target prey vulnerabilities to
maximise hunting success, while prey trade-off foraging against predation
avoidance. Though studies have demonstrated how predation risk can alter
how prey allocate daily foraging effort, little work has considered the
implications of this temporal component of behaviour from a predator’s
perspective, or assessed its influence on broad-scale predator-prey
interactions. We develop a method to compare daily activity patterns of
avian predators and prey using data from two large citizen science
datasets collected on different continents. Our analyses reveal evidence
for convergent daily hunting strategies across avian predators, with
distinct differences according to prey type. By comparing predator data
with correspondent data from songbirds, our study suggests that predators
(Accipiters) specialised to hunt songbirds match the activity patterns of
their prey species. These results indicate predators have evolved common
temporal hunting strategies to exploit temporal patterns in prey
behaviour.