The evolution of the traplining pollinator role in hummingbirds, specialization is not an evolutionary dead end

Trapliners are pollinators that visit widely dispersed flowers along circuitous foraging routes. Through coevolution with the flowers they pollinate, trapliners are hypothesised to become more morphologically and ecologically specialised than their non-traplining counterparts. We hypothesised that independent transitions to traplining in hummingbirds should entail convergent morphological specialisation, and we tested whether such transitions are irreversible and lead to lower rates of diversification as predicted by the hypothesis that specialisation is an ‘evolutionary dead end’. We find that there have been multiple independent transitions to traplining across the hummingbird phylogeny, but reversals have been rare or incomplete at best. Multiple independent lineages of trapliners have become morphologically specialised, convergently evolving relatively large bills for their body size. Traplining is not an evolutionary dead end however, since trapliners continue to give rise to new t..., , , # Data from: The evolution of the traplining pollinator role in hummingbirds, specialization is not an evolutionary dead end

These are the code and data necessary to reproduce the analyses in this paper. They contain morphological, ecological and phylogenetic data on hummingbirds. Details on how these were obtained and references to the primary sources can be found in the accompanying paper.

## Description of the data and file structure

The file morpho.csv contains morphological measurements of hummingbird species used in this study. The units for each measurement are in the column names, for example Bill_dep_mm has the bill depth in mm. PC columns 1-3 contain the first three principal component scores of beak shape variation of museum specimens computed with geometric morphometrics. Csize_mm is the centroid size of the beak, a measure of size used in geometric morphometrics.

The file foraging.csv contains data on the foraging ecology of hummingbird species obtained from the liter...