AbstractSecurity is the vital phenomenon of wireless sensor network (WSN) to preserve the energy. Traditional techniques does not concern the security of routing purpose, it has limitation like low energy resource, unsecure communication channel. In this article, a dolphin echolocation optimized sailfish (DESF) algorithm for energy efficient (EE) and secured routing based on trust management in ZigBee WSN is proposed. The proposed method is combination of enhanced shortcut tree routing based dolphin echolocation sailfish (EOSTR) and DESF, hence it is called EOSTR‐DESF. Here, hybrid DESF with enhanced routing technique is used to select the optimal route. The proposed approach is implemented in NS2 and the performance of the proposed collaborative trust and tree routing based on DESF in ZigBee is compared with the existing approaches like particle swarm optimization‐ant colony optimization, firefly algorithm‐Hirschberg Sinclair, and whale optimization algorithm‐simulated annealing algorithm. Moreover, the performance is analyzed with metrics like delay, packet delivery ratio, energy consumption, throughput, and residual energy. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method is more efficient with varying nodes of 33.25%, 20.17%, 8.04% for different data transfer rate of 31.36%, 15.62%, 9.10%.