Repeated, irreversible evolution of ant-following behavior across Neotropical avian families

Ecological specialization is a result of the interplay between ecological and evolutionary processes. One iconic ecological specialization of the Neotropics involves birds that follow army ant swarms in feeding groups. Prior work has focused on a single avian family, the Neotropical antbirds (Thamnophilidae), but over a century of fieldwork has now revealed that ant-following occurs in hundreds of distantly related birds. To understand the relative contributions of shared ancestry and ecological specialization in the evolution of ant-following, we compiled a database of all Neotropical ant-following birds (n = 472 species) and their degree of specialization on army ants, and tested if: 1) ant-following becomes increasingly specialized through evolutionary time, and 2) ecomorphological functional traits predict ant-following behavior. Ancestral state reconstruction revealed that specialized ant-following evolved independently in eight clades and four families of Neotropical birds (Antbir..., , , # Data from: Repeated, irreversible evolution of ant-following behavior across Neotropical avian families

#### Data and Code File Overview

This data repository consists of 3 data files, 1 code script, and this README document, with the following data and code filenames and variables.

**Data Files**

1. \"FollowersOnly.csv\" is a file that contains all study species' Latin names (column 1, 'latin_name') and their respective ant-following level
(column 2, 'following_order') as an ordinal value (2-5).
2. \"FollowingPhylogeny.nex\" is a set of 1000 phylogenetic trees, of object type multiphylo, of the 465 study species as downloaded from Vertlife.org (Jetz et al., 2012).
3. \"Follower_Traits.csv\" is the functional trait database. The first column ('common_name') in this database is the species common (English name). The second column ('latin_name') in this database is the latin name of the species formatted \"Genus_species\". The third column ('latin name') is also the latin name of the spec...,