Open AccessHabitat productivity is a poor predictor of body size in rodents
Author(s) -
Bader H. Alhajeri,
Lucas Marafina Vieira Porto,
Renan Maestri
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
current zoology/environmental epigenetics/current zoology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.971
H-Index - 38
eISSN - 2058-5888
pISSN - 1674-5507
DOI - 10.1093/cz/zoz037
Subject(s) - normalized difference vegetation index , rodent , habitat , ecology , biology , vegetation (pathology) , statistics , geography , mathematics , medicine , pathology , leaf area index
The “resource availability hypothesis” predicts occurrence of larger rodents in more productive habitats. This prediction was tested in a dataset of 1,301 rodent species. We used adult body mass as a measure of body size and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) as a measure of habitat productivity. We utilized a cross-species approach to investigate the association between these variables. This was done at both the order level (Rodentia) and at narrower taxonomic scales. We applied phylogenetic generalized least squares (PGLS) to correct for phylogenetic relationships. The relationship between body mas and NDVI was also investigated across rodent assemblages. We controlled for spatial autocorrelation using generalized least squares (GLS) analysis. The cross-species approach found extremely low support for the resource availability hypothesis. This was reflected by a weak positive association between body mass and NDVI at the order level. We find a positive association in only a minority of rodent subtaxa. The best fit GLS model detected no significant association between body mass and NDVI across assemblages. Thus, our results do not support the view that resource availability plays a major role in explaining geographic variation in rodent body size.