Effects of consumer surface sterilization on diet DNA metabarcoding data of terrestrial invertebrates in natural environments and feeding trials

These are data and code from a study examining the potential for surface contamination to influence diet DNA metabarcoding datasets when DNA is sequenced from full body parts (in this case, the opisthosomas of spider individuals). These datasets include the raw sequencing data, all downstream datasets, and taxonomic assignments collected from database searches on BOLD and GenBank (accessed 2019). The code includes code to reproduce all bioinformatics (merge, filter, match to taxonomies, rarefy, sort) as well as all statistics and figures generated from analyses. Raw data are from DNA extractions of predator gut regions (opisthosomas) and amplification of the CO1 gene using PCR. The predator species is Heteropoda venatoria collected individually with sterilized implements and either the diet sequences from their natural diets were extracted or their diets following feeding spiders in a feeding trial.