What is it about?
In this study, we collect body size information of 1,315 rodent species occurring around the world along with the typical climatic conditions that they encounter across their range. We find that even after accounting for the evolutionary relationships among rodent species, generally, larger rodent species tend to occur in regions with more precipitation than smaller rodent species. This seems to point towards the role of food availability in driving body size variation across rodent species at the order level.
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Why is it important?
Our findings show that the pattern of increased body size in colder climates (Bergmann's rule), which is common in endotherms., does not seem to hold at the order level in rodents.
Perspectives
This is the first research article that I wrote that did not rely on dissertation data. What was interesting about it is the fact that this is the first time, to my knowledge, that this common biogeographic rule (Bergmann's rule) was tested at this broad scale, after applying phylogenetic correction. I also like the idea of using an extremely large dataset, across a very broad taxonomic scale, to investigate a relatively interesting (and straight-forward) pattern that biologists have noticed across various groups since it was first described by Carl Bergmann in 1847.
Bader H Alhajeri
Kuwait University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Association between climate and body size in rodents: A phylogenetic test of Bergmann's rule, Mammalian Biology, March 2016, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.mambio.2015.12.001.
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