Sample metrics and analyses
Read metrics (counts and number of zOTUs) were acquired using different
summarizing functions during bioinformatic processing (grep, obigrep,
gawk), and selection functions (tidyverse, Wickham et al., 2019) during
taxonomic filtration in R. To isolate the effect of differential
sequencing, we generated an additional dataset (referred to as ‘pilot
full’) by sub-setting – from the full dataset – the same real samples
that were sequenced in the pilot (n = 75). To test how well the
different datasets represent prey diversity, we performed rarefaction
analyses with the rarecurve function (step = 10) of vegan (Oksanen et
al., 2019), and calculated the average number of reads required to
discover new zOTUs (rareslope, sample = sample total reads).