Data for: Diet of large Catfishes from Madeira River

This dataset was used in Röpke et al. 2025 “Diet seasonality and resource partitioning by large catfishes in the Madeira River, Brazil. Published at Acta Amazonica to investigate two questions: (1) Do the diets of Brachyplatystoma species, as habitat specialists with large home ranges, exhibit seasonal variation?; and (2) How do habitat use and congeneric traits relate to the trophic segregation of large catfish species, enabling their co-occurrence in the Madeira River? The diet was described for eight species, of which diet seasonality was tested for four, while diet dissimilarity and overlap were estimated for seven regarding only the low-water season. The large pimelodids feed upon many fish families. Most Brachyplatystoma species did not exhibit seasonal shifts in prey consumption. Diet overlap was higher among congeneric and channel-restricted species, particularly Brachyplatystoma platynemum, B. rousseauxii, and B. vaillantii. Despite the diet overlap, some degree of trophic niche partitioning was observed, even among channel-restricted Brachyplatystoma species, mainly when comparing B. filamentosum to the other congeneric species.