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Dietary studies are critical for understanding foraging strategies and have important applications in conservation and habitat management. We applied a robust metabarcoding protocol to characterize the diet of the critically endangered freshwater fish Zingel asper and conducted modelling and simulation analyses to characterize and identify some of the drivers of individual trophic trait variation in this species. We found that intra-specific competition and ontogeny had minor effects on the trophic niche of Z. asper. Instead, our results suggest that the majority of trophic niche variation was driven by seasonal variation in ecological opportunity (in our case, the seasonal variation in the availability of preferred prey types). Overall, our results are in line with the optimal foraging theory and suggest that Z. asper is specialized on a few ephemeropteran prey species (Baetis fuscatus and Ecdyonurus) but adapts its foraging by becoming more opportunistic as its favoured prey seasonally decline. Despite the now widespread usage of metabarcoding, very few studies have attempted to study inter- and intra-populational individual trophic traits variation with metabarcoding data. This study illustrates how metabarcoding data obtained from feces can be combined with modelling and simulation approaches to test hypotheses in the conventional analytic framework of trophic analysis.

Pour guider les actions de gestion et de conservation d’une espèce menacée, il est indispensable d’acquérir des connaissances sur son écologie, et en particulier sur son régime et son comportement alimentaires. Dans le cadre du Plan national d’actions en faveur de l’apron du Rhône, des scientifiques d’Irstea et d'Aix-Marseille Université ont identifié certains paramètres clefs pour améliorer ou restaurer la capacité d’accueil du milieu sur le plan de la disponibilité des ressources trophiques. Ils ont pour cela mobilisé une approche très innovante qui associe d’une part le métabarcoding pour déterminer et quantifier le régime alimentaire de l’apron, et d’autre part un échantillonnage intensif des macroinvertébrés aquatiques benthiques de quatre rivières.