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.