Related papers: How large should whales be?
Body size drives the energetic demands of organisms, constraining trophic interactions between species and playing a significant role in shaping the feasibility of species' populations in a community. On macroevolutionary timescales, these…
The group of large aquatic mammals has representatives being the largest living beings on earth, surpassing the weight and size of dinosaurs. In this paper, we present some empirical evidence and a mathematical model to argue that fat…
The distribution of species body size within taxonomic groups exhibits a heavy right-tail extending over many orders of magnitude, where most species are significantly larger than the smallest species. We provide a simple model of…
Body size or mass is one of the main factors underlying food webs structure. A large number of evolutionary models have shown that indeed, the adaptive evolution of body size (or mass) can give rise to hierarchically organised trophic…
We present a quantitative model for the biological evolution of species body masses within large groups of related species, e.g., terrestrial mammals, in which body mass M evolves according to branching (speciation), multiplicative…
Natural selection for terrestrial locomotion has yielded unifying patterns in the body shape of legged animals, often manifesting as scaling laws. One such pattern appears in the frontal aspect ratio. Smaller animals like insects typically…
Mathematical modelling of the evolution of the size-spectrum dynamics in aquatic ecosystems was discovered to be a powerful tool to have a deeper insight into impacts of human- and environmental driven changes on the marine ecosystem. In…
We discuss the problem of observation of natural similarity in skeletal evolution of terrestrial mammals. Analysis is given by means of testing of the power scaling laws established in long bone allometry, which describe development of…
There has been some confusion concerning the animal group-size: an exponential distribution was deduced by maximizing the entropy; lognormal distributions were practically used; a power-law decay with exponent {3/2} was proposed in physical…
On average men are taller and more muscular than women, which confers on them advantages related to female choice and during physical competition with other men. Sexual size dimorphisms such as these come with vulnerabilities due to higher…
Mammals have a high metabolism that produces heat proportionally to the power 3/4 of their mass at rest. Any excess of heat has to be dissipated in the surrounding environment to prevent overheating. Most of that dissipation occurs through…
Within large taxonomic assemblages, the number of species with adult body mass M is characterized by a broad but asymmetric distribution, with the largest mass being orders of magnitude larger than the typical mass. This canonical shape can…
Microbial adaptation to extreme stress, such as starvation, antimicrobial exposure, or freezing often reveals fundamental trade-offs between survival and proliferation. Understanding how populations navigate these trade-offs in fluctuating…
An increasing number of studies have demonstrated correlations between climate trends and body size change of organisms. In many cases, climate might be expected to influence body size by altering thermoregulation, energetics or food…
Mass extinction is a phenomenon in the history of life on Earth when a considerable number of species go extinct over a relatively short period of time. The magnitude of extinction varies between the events, the most well known are the…
We study a mechanistic mathematical model of extinction and coexistence in a generic hunter-prey ecosystem. The model represents typical scenarios of human invasion and environmental change, characteristic of the late Pleistocene,…
The networks of predator-prey interactions in ecological systems are remarkably complex, but nevertheless surprisingly stable in terms of long term persistence of the system as a whole. In order to understand the mechanism driving the…
The evolution of various competing cell types in tissues, and the resulting persistent tissue population, is studied numerically and analytically in a particle-based model of active tissues. Mutations change the properties of cells in…
Darwin introduced the concept of the "living fossil" to describe species belonging to lineages that have experienced little evolutionary change, and suggested that species in more slowly evolving lineages are more prone to extinction (1).…
Natural selection has produced an extraordinary diversity of life histories spanning many orders of magnitude in body size, vital rates, and biological times. In general, big and cold organisms grow and reproduce slowly and live long lives;…