A matter of weight: Critical comments on the basic data analysed by Maestri et al. (2016) in Journal of Biogeography, 43, 1192–1202

Abstract

Recently, Maestri, Luza, et al. (2016) assessed the effect of ecology and phylogeny on body size variation in communities of South American Sigmodontinae rodents. Regrettably, a cursory analysis of the data and the phylogeny used to address this question indicates that both are plagued with inaccuracies. We urge "big data" users to give due diligence at compiling data in order to avoid developing hypotheses based on insufficient or misleading basic information.We are living a great time in evolutionary biology, where the combination of the increased power of systematics, coupled with the use of ever more inclusive datasets allows-heretofore impossiblequestions in ecology and evolution to be addressed. the change in the generic affiliation of Phyllotis wolffsohni to Tapecomys. These aspects highlight two main issues not clarified by

A comprehensive review of dietary strategies of sigmodontine rodents of central-eastern Argentina: linking diet, body mass, and stomach morphology

“…Following Gagnon and Chew (2000), we used single body mass estimates to minimize computational difficulties that would arise from considering sex dimorphism, annual or geographic variation. Body mass information was derived from six sources, in which values respecting size relationships between the species were chosen (Leveau et al 2006;Chebez et al 2014;Maestri et al 2016a;Pardiñas et al 2017aPardiñas et al , 2017bCoda et al 2019). Body mass normality was analyzed using the Shapiro-Wilk test (Shapiro and Wilk 1965).…”