Conclusions

Our results show that brute force sequencing can serve as a simple and efficient approach for prey metabarcoding of consumers that are less known to science or difficult to dissect. Exactly how many extra reads one should ask for to offset the losses to consumer sequencing depends on multiple often unknown factors like copy number variation, life cycle and seasonal parameters. We therefore suggest sequencing deeper than what is strictly required based on an arbitrary ratio (e.g. with expectancy of 99% consumer reads), as this approach is more cost-efficient than resequencing samples with low coverage.