Supporting data to: Evolution of realized Eltonian niches across Rajidae species

The notion that closely related species resemble each other in ecological niche space (i.e., phylogenetic dependence) has been a longstanding, contentious paradigm in evolutionary biology, the incidence of which is important for predicting the ecosystem-level effects of species loss. Despite being examined across a multitude of terrestrial taxa, many aspects of niche conservatism have yet to be explored in marine species, especially for characteristics related to resource use and trophic behavior (Eltonian niche characteristics, ENCs). We combined ENCs derived from stable isotope ratios at assemblage- and species-levels with phylogenetic comparative methods to test the hypotheses that benthic marine fishes: 1) will exhibit similar assemblage-wide ENCs regardless of geographic location, and 2) will display phylogenetically dependent ENCs at the species-level. We used a 12-species sub-set of the monophyletic group Rajidae sampled from three independent assemblages (Central California, Gul...