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420 results for “Body size data”
Data from: Evolution of size-dependent intraspecific competition predicts body size scaling of metabolic rate
1. Growth in body size is accompanied by changes in foraging capacity and metabolic costs, which lead to changes in competitive ability during ontogeny. The resulting size-dependent competitive asymmetry influences population dynamics and community structure, but it is not clear whether natural selection leads to asymmetry in intraspecific competition. 2. We address this question by using a size-structured consumer-resource model, in which the strength and direction of competitive asymmetry between different consumer individuals depends on the scaling of maximum ingestion and maintenance metabolism with consumer body size. We use adaptive dynamics to study selection on the scaling exponents of these processes. 3. Selection leads to an identical scaling of maximum ingestion and maintenance metabolism with consumer body size. Equal scaling exponents neutralise strong competitive differences within the consumer population, because all consumer individuals require the same amount of resources to cover maintenance requirements. Furthermore, the scaling exponents respond adaptively to changes in mortality such that biomass production through growth or reproduction increases in the life stage that is subject to increased mortality. Also, decreasing size at birth leads to increased investment in juvenile growth, while increasing maximum size leads to increased investment in post-maturation growth and reproduction. 4. These results provide an explanation for observed variation in the ontogenetic scaling of metabolic rate with body size. Data of teleost fish are presented that support these predictions. However, selection towards equal scaling exponents is contradicted by empirical findings, which suggests that additional ecological complexity beyond this basic consumer-resource interaction is required to understand the evolution of size-dependent asymmetry in intraspecific competition.
Data from: Lowland biotic attrition revisited: body size and variation among climate change 'winners' and 'losers'
The responses of lowland tropical communities to climate change will critically influence global biodiversity but remain poorly understood. If species in these systems are unable to tolerate warming, the communities—currently the most diverse on Earth—may become depauperate ('biotic attrition'). In response to temperature changes, animals can adjust their distribution in space or their activity in time, but these two components of the niche are seldom considered together. We assessed the spatio-temporal niches of rainforest mammal species in Borneo across gradients in elevation and temperature. Most species are not predicted to experience changes in spatio-temporal niche availability, even under pessimistic warming scenarios. Responses to temperature are not predictable by phylogeny but do appear to be trait-based, being much more variable in smaller-bodied taxa. General circulation models and weather station data suggest unprecedentedly high midday temperatures later in the century; predicted responses to this warming among small-bodied species range from 9% losses to 6% gains in spatio-temporal niche availability, while larger species have close to 0% predicted change. Body mass may therefore be a key ecological trait influencing the identity of climate change winners and losers. Mammal species composition will probably change in some areas as temperatures rise, but full-scale biotic attrition this century appears unlikely.
Data and Code Files for Dalponti et al. Climate Affects the Correlated Evolution of Body Size and Trophic Position in Fishes
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Primary data on skull and brain morphology for: Geographical patterns in seasonal changes of body mass, skull, and brain size of common shrews
<p class="Standard">Some small mammals exhibit Dehnel's Phenomenon, a drastic decrease in body mass, braincase and brain size from summer to winter, followed by regrowth in spring. This is accompanied by a reorganization of the brain and changes in other organs. The evolutionary link between these changes and seasonality remains unclear, although the intensity of change varies between locations as the phenomenon is thought to lead to energy savings during winter.</p> <p class="Standard">Here we explored geographic variation of the intensity of Dehnel's Phenomenon in <i>Sorex araneus.</i> We compiled literature on seasonal changes in braincase size, brain and body mass, supplemented by our own data from Poland, Germany, and the Czech Republic.</p> <p class="Standard">We analysed the effect of geographic and climate variables on the intensity of change and patterns of brain reorganization.</p> <p class="Standard">From summer to winter the braincase height decreased by 13%, followed by 10% regrowth in spring.</p> <p class="Standard">For body mass the changes were -21%/+82%, respectively. Changes increased towards northeast. Several climate variables were correlated with these transformations, confirming a link of the intensity of the changes with environmental conditions. This relationship differed for the decrease vs. regrowth, suggesting that they may have evolved under different selective pressures.</p> <p class="Standard">We found no geographic trends explaining variability in the brain mass changes although they were similar (-21%/+10%) to those of the braincase size. Underlying patterns of change in brain organisation in north-eastern Poland were almost identical to the pattern observed in southern Germany. This indicates that local habitat characteristics may play a more important role in determining brain structure than broad scale geographic conditions.</p> <p>We discuss the techniques and criteria used for studying this phenomenon, as well as its potential presence in other taxa and the importance of distinguishing it from other kinds of seasonal variation.</p>
Functional and ecomorphological evolution of orbit shape in Mesozoic archosaurs is driven by body size and diet: Geometric morphometric data, 3D models (stl files), FEA models (Hypermesh, Abaqus files)
<p class="MsoNormal">The orbit is one of several skull openings in the archosauromorph skull. Intuitively, it could be assumed that orbit shape would closely approximate the shape and size of the eyeball resulting in a predominantly circular morphology. However, a quantification of orbit shape across Archosauromorpha using a geometric morphometric approach demonstrates a large morphological diversity despite the fact that the majority of species retained a circular orbit. This morphological diversity is nearly exclusively driven by large (skull length > 1000 mm) and carnivorous species in all studied archosauromorph groups, but particularly prominently in theropod dinosaurs. While circular orbit shapes are retained in most herbivores and smaller species, as well as in juveniles and early ontogenetic stages, large carnivores adopted elliptical and keyhole-shaped orbits. Biomechanical modeling using finite element analysis reveals that these morphologies are beneficial in mitigating and dissipating feeding-induced stresses without additional reinforcement of the bony structure of the skull.</p>
Data from: Male body size predicts reproductive success but not within-clutch paternity patterns in gopher tortoises (Gopherus polyphemus)
In many vertebrates, body size is an important driver of variation in male reproductive success. Larger, more fit individuals are more likely to dominate mating opportunities, skewing siring success and resulting in lower effective population sizes and genetic diversity. The mating system of the gopher tortoise (Gopherus polyphemus) has been characterized as both female-defense and scramble-competition polygyny. Mating systems are typically not fixed and can be influenced by factors such as population density, demographic structure, and environmental conditions; however, most populations will have a predominant strategy that results from local conditions. We assessed how male body size influences patterns of paternity and reproductive success in a natural population of gopher tortoises in Florida, USA. Using microsatellites, we assigned parentage of 220 hatchlings from 31 nests collected during two reproductive seasons. Larger males were significantly more likely to sire offspring and sired more offspring than smaller males; however, the likelihood of a clutch being multiply-sired was unrelated to male body size. We also found evidence of mate fidelity across years. Although paternity patterns in this high-density population are more consistent with defense polygyny, female monopoly by males was incomplete, with both large and small males contributing to multiply-sired clutches. Additional behavioral data are needed to clarify the role of female mate selection in paternity outcomes. The context-dependence of mating systems underscores the need to compare parentage patterns across populations and to recognize the potential for more than one strategy to be employed within a single population.
Data from: Pollinator body size mediates the scale at which land use drives crop pollination services
1. Ecosystem services to agriculture, such as pollination, rely on natural areas adjacent to farmland to support organisms that provide services. Native insect pollinators depend on natural or semi-natural land surrounding farms for nesting and alternative foraging resources. Despite interest in conserving pollinators through habitat restoration, the scale at which land use affects pollinators and thus crop pollination services is not well understood. 2. We measured abundance of native, wild bee pollinators and the pollination services they provided to highbush blueberry Vaccinium corymbosum L. crops at 16 sites that varied in the proportion of surrounding agricultural land cover at both the field scale (300 m radius) and the landscape scale (1500 m radius). We designed our study such that agricultural land cover at the field scale was uncorrelated with agricultural cover at the landscape scale across sites. We used model selection to determine which spatial scale better predicted aggregate bee abundance, abundance of large versus small bees, and crop pollination services. 3. We found that, overall, bees responded more strongly to farm-scale than to landscape-scale land cover, but the scale at which land cover had the strongest effect varied by bee body size. Large bees showed a negative response to increasing agricultural cover at both scales, but were most strongly affected by the landscape scale. Small bees were negatively affected by agricultural land cover but only at the farm scale, while they had a small positive response to agricultural cover at the landscape scale. 4. Aggregate pollination services from native bees were more strongly influenced by local agricultural cover, due to the combined effects of both large and small bees responding at that scale. 5. Synthesis and applications. Bee abundance and pollination services were strongly determined by farm-scale agricultural cover, suggesting that farm-scale set-asides may provide significant benefits to pollination services. Further, we found that pollinators respond differently to land use depending on body size, but all groups of bees benefit from decreasing agricultural cover at the farm scale. Therefore, small-scale modifications to habitat can have significant impacts on both pollinator abundance and pollination services to crop plants.
Data from: Individual diet differences in a molluscivore shorebird are associated with the size of body instruments for internal processing rather than for feeding
Especially in birds, it is widely found that the size of individual prey items follows the size of the instruments of prey capture, handling and processing, i.e. bill size. In fact, this is the natural history basis of major discoveries on adaptative evolution in the face of changing food resources. In some birds, e.g. the molluscivore shorebirds ingesting hard-shelled prey, most of the prey processing process takes place within the digestive tract. This study of a salvaged sample of actively feeding great knots Calidris tenuirostris accidentally drowned in fishing nets in northern China, is the first documentation of diet selection at the level of the individual in previously well-studied molluscivore shorebirds. Diet composition was not associated with the length of the bill, but with the mass of the muscular gizzard. Gizzard mass, which unlike bill length is a phenotypically flexible trait, enables great knots to adjust to changing food resources as an individual, i.e. instantly responding to the food on offer. For migratory species like great knots which rely on seasonal sequences of inter distant feeding areas offering prey with a variety of characteristics, the capacity to individually adjust appears a key adaptation.
Data from: Evolutionary shifts in mustelid (Mustelidae: Carnivora) cranial shape, body size, and body shape coincides with the Mid-Miocene Climate Transition
Environmental changes can lead to evolutionary shifts in phenotypic traits, which in turn facilitate exploitation of novel adaptive landscapes and lineage diversification. The global cooling, increased aridity, and expansion of open grasslands during the past 50 million years are prime examples of new adaptive landscapes that spurred lineage and ecomorphological diversity of several mammalian lineages such as rodents and large herbivorous megafauna. However, whether these environmental changes facilitated evolutionary shifts in small to mid-sized predator morphology is unknown. Here, I used a complete cranial and body morphological dataset to examine the timing of evolutionary shifts in cranial shape, body size, and body shape within extant mustelids (martens, otters, polecats, and weasels) during the climatic and environmental changes of the Cenozoic. I found that evolutionary shifts in all three traits occurred within extant mustelid subclades just after the onset of the Mid-Miocene Climate Transition. These mustelid subclades first shifted towards more elongate body plans followed by concurrent shifts towards smaller body sizes and more robust crania. I hypothesize that these cranial and body morphological shifts enabled mustelids to exploit novel adaptive zones associated with the climatic and environmental changes of the Mid to Late Miocene, which facilitated significant increases in clade carrying capacity.
Data from: Selection for relative brain size affects context-dependent male preferences, but not discrimination, of female body size in guppies
Understanding what drives animal decisions is fundamental in evolutionary biology, and mate choice decisions are arguably some of the most important decisions in any individual's life. As cognitive ability can impact decision-making, elucidating the link between mate choice and cognitive ability is necessary to fully understand mate choice. To experimentally study this link, we used guppies (Poecilia reticulata) artificially selected for divergence in relative brain size and with previously demonstrated differences in cognitive ability. A previous test in our female guppy selection lines demonstrated the impact of brain size and cognitive ability on information processing during female mate choice decisions. Here we evaluated the effect of brain size and cognitive ability on male mate choice decisions. Specifically, we investigated the preferences of large-brained, small-brained, and non-selected guppy males for female body size, a key indicator of female fecundity in this species. For this, male preferences were quantified in dichotomous choice tests when presented to dyads of females with small, medium and large body size differences. All types of males showed preference for larger females but no effect of brain size was found in the ability to discriminate between differently sized females. However, we found that non-selected and large-brained males, but not small-brained males, showed context-dependent preferences for larger females depending on the difference in female size. Our results have two important implications. First, they provide further evidence that male mate choice occurs also in a species in which secondary sexual ornamentation occurs only in males. Second, they show that brain size and cognitive ability have important effects on individual variation in mating preferences and sexually selected traits.
Data from: Testing for Depéret's rule (body size increase) in mammals using combined extinct and extant data
Whether or not evolutionary lineages in general show a tendency to increase in body size has often been discussed. This tendency has been dubbed "Cope's rule" but because Cope never hypothesized it, we suggest renaming it after Depéret, who formulated it clearly in 1907. Depéret's rule has traditionally been studied using fossil data, but more recently a number of studies have used present-day species. While several paleontological studies of Cenozoic placental mammals have found support for increasing body size, most studies of extant placentals have failed to detect such a trend. Here, we present a method to combine information from present-day species with fossil data in a Bayesian phylogenetic framework. We apply the method to body mass estimates of a large number of extant and extinct mammal species, and find strong support for Depéret's rule. The tendency for size increase appears to be driven not by evolution toward larger size in established species, but by processes related to the emergence of new species. Our analysis shows that complementary data from extant and extinct species can greatly improve inference of macroevolutionary processes.
Data from: Cope's rule and the adaptive landscape of dinosaur body size evolution
The largest known dinosaurs weighed at least 20 million times as much as the smallest, indicating exceptional phenotypic divergence. Previous studies have focused on extreme giant sizes, tests of Cope's rule, and miniaturization on the line leading to birds. We use non-uniform macroevolutionary models based on Ornstein–Uhlenbeck and trend processes to unify these observations, asking: what patterns of evolutionary rates, directionality and constraint explain the diversification of dinosaur body mass? We find that dinosaur evolution is constrained by attraction to discrete body size optima that undergo rare, but abrupt, evolutionary shifts. This model explains both the rarity of multi-lineage directional trends, and the occurrence of abrupt directional excursions during the origins of groups such as tiny pygostylian birds and giant sauropods. Most expansion of trait space results from rare, constraint-breaking innovations in just a small number of lineages. These lineages shifted rapidly into novel regions of trait space, occasionally to small sizes, but most often to large or giant sizes. As with Cenozoic mammals, intermediate body sizes were typically attained only transiently by lineages on a trajectory from small to large size. This demonstrates that bimodality in the macroevolutionary adaptive landscape for land vertebrates has existed for more than 200 million years.
Data from: Degree of specialization is related to body size in herbivorous insects: a phylogenetic confirmation
Numerous studies have suggested a general relationship between the degree of host specialization and body size in herbivorous animals. In insects, smaller species are usually shown to be more specialized than larger-bodied ones. Various hypotheses have attempted to explain this pattern but rigorous proof of the body size-diet breadth relationship has been lacking, primarily because the scarceness of reliable phylogenetic information has precluded formal comparative analyses. Explicitly using phylogenetic information for a group of herbivores (geometrid moths) and their host plant range, we perform a comparative analysis to study the body size-diet breadth relationship. Considering several alternative measures of body size and diet breadth, our results convincingly demonstrate without previous methodological issues – a first for any taxon – a positive association between these traits, which has implications for evaluating various central aspects of the evolutionary ecology of herbivorous insects. We additionally demonstrate how the methods used in this study can be applied in assessing hypotheses to explain the body size-diet breadth relationship. By analyzing the relationship in tree-feeders alone and finding that the positive relationship remains, the result suggests that the body size-diet breadth relationship is not solely driven by the type of host plant that species feed on.
Data from: Predator-prey dynamics and the plasticity of predator body size
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Data from: Body size evolution in mammals: complexity in tempo and mode
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Data from: Hot rocks and not-so-hot rocks on the seashore: patterns and body-size dependent consequences of microclimatic variation in intertidal zone boulder habitat
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Data from: Lowland biotic attrition revisited: body size and variation among climate change ‘winners’ and ‘losers’
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Data from: Intraspecific variation in body size does not alter the effects of mesopredators on prey
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Data from: A metabolic and body-size scaling framework for parasite within-host abundance, biomass, and energy flux
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Data from: Phylogenetic comparative analysis supports aposematic colouration–body size association in millipede assassins (Hemiptera: Reduviidae: Ectrichodiinae)
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