The identification of biological pattern is often complicated by the lack of methodologically consistent data with broad geographic coverage, especially when considering functional characteristics of organisms that differ greatly in body size and morphology. In our study (Dahlke et al. 2020), we addressed the problem of data scarcity by using different types of observational and experimental data together with statistical (phylogenetic) data imputation, and by placing our analysis into the context of a physiological concept, which provides a mechanism-based explanation for the observed pattern (ontogenetic shift in thermal tolerance of fish) and with respect to transition from sublethal to lethal thresholds. Here, we show with comparative examples that our results were not affected by the use of methodologically inconsistent data.