Dietary metabarcoding has vastly improved our ability to analyse the diets of animals, but it is hampered by a plethora of technical limitations including potentially reduced data output due to the disproportionate amplification of the DNA of the focal predator, here termed ‘the predator problem’. We review the various methods commonly used to overcome this problem, from deeper sequencing to exclusion of predator DNA during PCR, and how they may interfere with increasingly common multi-predator-taxon studies. We suggest that multi-primer approaches with an emphasis on achieving both depth and breadth of prey detections may overcome the issue to some extent, although multi-taxon studies require further consideration, as highlighted by an empirical example. We also review several alternative methods for reducing the prevalence of predator DNA that are conceptually promising but require additional empirical examination. The predator problem is a key constraint on molecular dietary analyses but, through this synthesis, we hope to guide researchers in overcoming this in an effective and pragmatic way.

Nutrients are a critical driver of ecological interactions (e.g., plant-herbivore, predator-prey and host-parasite) but are not yet integrated into ecological networks. Ecological concepts like nutrient-specific foraging and nutrient-dependent functional responses provide invaluable mechanistic context to complex ecological interactions. These concepts in turn offer an opportunity to predict dynamic network processes such as interaction rewiring and cascading extinction events. Here, we propose the concept of nutritional networks. By integrating nutritional data into ecological networks, we envisage significant advances to our understanding of ecological dynamics at every scale from individuals to ecosystems. We summarise the potential influence of nutrients on the structure and complexity of ecological networks, with specific reference to niche partitioning, predator-prey dynamics, spatiotemporal patterns and robustness. Using an empirical example of an inter-specific trophic network, we show that networks can be constructed with nutritional data to disentangle the drivers of ecological interactions in natural systems. Throughout, we identify fundamental ecological hypotheses that can be explored in a nutritional network context, and highlight methodological frameworks to facilitate their operationalisation.