A huge thanks to my coauthors, John Alroy, Kate Lyons, and senior author Drew Allen.

We also found that species with higher diet similarity are more likely to exhibit co-occurrence patterns that diverge from expectations, in both directions.

Summary: We developed a method that allowed us to discover the effect of multiple driving variables on the co-occurrence of species. We looked at hundreds of species of bats and birds in the neotropics and found that phylogenetic relatedness was the strongest cause of co-occurrence.