Related papers: Estimating body mass in the leatherback turtle Der…
We present the first combined analysis of diving behaviour and dispersal patterns in gravid leatherback turtles during 3 consecutive nesting seasons in French Guiana. In total 23 turtles were fitted with Argos satellite transmitters and 16…
Despite decades of conservation efforts on the nesting beaches, the critical status of leatherback turtles shows that their survival predominantly depends on our ability to reduce at-sea mortality. Although areas where leatherbacks meet…
Tracks of marine animals in the wild, now increasingly acquired by electronic tagging of individuals, are of prime interest not only to identify habitats and high-risk areas, but also to gain detailed information about the behaviour of…
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…
The evolution and distribution of species body sizes for terrestrial mammals is well-explained by a macroevolutionary tradeoff between short-term selective advantages and long-term extinction risks from increased species body size,…
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…
Modeling fish growth is an important research topic in ecological and fishery sciences because body weight statistics directly affect the total biomass of fish in a habitat, which in turn affects their population dynamics. Many models of…
In spite of the abundance and commercial importance of these two species, there is little published weight-length data for the gafftopsail catfish (Bagre marinus) and hardhead catfish (Ariopsis felis). For this study 84 catfish were caught…
Shape variability represents an important direct response of organisms to selective environments. Here, we use a combination of geometric morphometrics and generalised additive mixed models (GAMMs) to identify spatial patterns of natural…
Passive biometric identification enables wildlife monitoring with minimal disturbance. Using a motion-activated camera placed at an elevated position and facing downwards, we collected images of sea turtle carapace, each belonging to one 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…
The Sauropoda were the largest terrestrial animals ever to have lived on this planet. As their nutritional requirements were so huge, their diet holds sway over the ecology of many Mesozoic herbivores. The diet of the sauropods is limited…
Simulating marine sponge growth helps marine biologists analyze, measure, and predict the effects that the marine environment has on marine sponges, and vice versa. This paper describes a way to simulate and grow geometric models of the…
Weight at delivery is a standard cumulative measure of placental growth. But weight is a crude summary of other placental characteristics, such as the size and shape of the chorionic plate and the location of the umbilical cord insertion.…
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…
Blue Mesa Reservoir is the largest body of water in Colorado and is located on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains at an elevation of 7520 feet. Blue Mesa Reservoir contains recreationally important populations of lake trout…
While the importance of extreme conditions is recognised, patterns in species abundances are often interpreted through average environmental conditions within their distributional range. For marine species with pelagic larvae, temperature…
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…
Selection analyses of long-term field data frequently use annual comparisons from longlived species with overlapping generations to measure fitness differences with respect to phenotypic characteristics, such as annual phenological timing.…
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…