Data associated with: A phylogenetic perspective on ecological specialisation reveals hummingbird and insect pollinators have generalist diets

Specialisation in food resource use is a crucial process that fosters species coexistence in plant-animal networks, contributing to the maintenance of biodiversity, ecological complexity, and community stability. Notably, although there is a vast literature on ecological specialisation in pollination systems, the evolutionary similarity among the plant species visited by particular pollinators has been largely ignored. Here, we apply a robust phylogenetic approach to analyse whether the evolutionary relatedness of plant species is a significant factor in mediating pollinator visits and how it relates to the morphology of interacting species. We quantified ecological and clade specialisation of hummingbird and insect species in three mutualistic networks from the Costa Rican highlands and associated these metrics with species traits. We found that hummingbirds were overall ecologically more specialised than insects (i.e. visited a less diverse set of plant species). However, when evaluating the phylogenetic relatedness among the visited plant species, all hummingbird species and most insects had overdispersed diets, which indicates they visited phylogenetically distant plant species in the community. Moreover, a great proportion of these clade generalists visited plant species with a great variation in corolla length, showing a lack of preference for this morphological trait. Altogether, our results demonstrate that by incorporating plant phylogeny to network analysis, pollinator species were generalists and that corolla length weakly influences plant-pollinator interactions in the three studied networks. A phylogenetic perspective should occupy a central role in the study of specialisation since it contributes to understanding the interplay between ecological and evolutionary processes in mutualistic networks. Future research should focus on evaluating whether the phylogenetic structure of animal diets mediates patterns of interactions in different types of mutualisms and environmental contexts, linking these patterns to other floral traits. This knowledge may be valuable for deepening our comprehension of the underlying mechanisms shaping ecological networks.

Methods
The study was conducted in central–southern Costa Rica on the Caribbean and Pacific slopes of the Talamanca mountains, a volcanic mountain range that forms the spine of the Central American Isthmus from central Costa Rica through western Panama. This area includes the Cerro de la Muerte, which has the largest extent of páramo in the country (09° 60' N, 83° 76' W). The páramo is a neotropical grass- and shrub-dominated ecosystem that occupies the cool and wet upper slopes of neotropical mountains. Field data collection was conducted at three sites of about 12 ha each: Cerro las Vueltas Biological Reserve, Cerro Sákira, and Cerro Buena Vista (hereafter Reserve, Sákira, and Buena Vista, respectively) at elevations between 3000 and 3400 m a.s.l. We collected data on plant-pollinator interactions as well as on abundance and morphological traits of interacting species. Because the two types of studied organisms (plants and mobile pollinators) differ in space use, different approaches for sampling them are required. We used different plots distributed across each study site to sample plants and pollinators, as in other studies (López-Segoviano et al. 2023). In order to accurately record interactions and pollinator species abundance, given the great differences in size and behaviour between hummingbirds and insects, we used different survey techniques for these groups following similar protocols used in previous research (Lehmann et al. 2019). Field data were collected during sampling periods ca. every 12 days in every month at each study site over an entire year, from January to December 2016.