I am trying to find out whether some morphometric data of land planarians (for now, especially position of the dorsal insertion of the pharynx and position of the mouth) can predict their diet, but I am not quite sure about how I could compare the morphometry with the diet.
For now I have two measurements:
1. Relative position of the dorsal insertion of the pharynx in the pharyngeal pouch (which determines the shape of the pharynx);
2. Relative position of the mouth on the pharyngeal pouch.
I also have data on what organisms (prey species) are consumed by some of the species from which I took measurments. I separated the prey into 7 groups: woodlice, harvestmen, earthworms, snails, veronicellid slugs, agriolimacid slugs and other land planarians.
Does anyone have suggestions on how to deal with these data? Thanks in advance!
This sounds interesting! Do you have some taxa names of species in focus of your research as an example? Just to get an idea of your work.
I think it would be a good thing to get some more data like the relative body lenght standardized by killing specimens in a good relaxing fluid to elongate them to the possible maximum of their total body lenght. Maybe some seemingly non food-related measurements like the eyespot distance in relation to the relative body lenght might be also interesting. I think this is a case for multi dimensional plots to use some statistics.
Best method is multvaraiate statistics cluster and nMDS analysis.
Thank you very much for your suggestions! I was indeed thinking of using an NMDS analysis and trying to use some additional morphometric data.
Would a discriminant function analysis work? This has been used to distinguish grazing vs browsing ungulates:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21915893
And nectar vs. gum vs. fruit feeding primates:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/(SICI)1096-8644(199702)102:2%3C187::AID-AJPA4%3E3.0.CO;2-W/abstract
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