Home Range, Time, and Body Size in Mammals

Abstract

The relationship between home range area and body size of terrestrial mammals is reconsidered in light of the concept of biological time. Biological time is an internal, body-massdependent, time scale to which the durations (or rates) of biological events are entrained. These events range from purely physiological (e.g., muscle contraction time) to purely ecological (e.g., time to traverse home range).Evidence is presented that home range size scales linearly to body mass for carnivores as it does for herbivores. This scaling supports the hypothesis that animals select their home range areas to meet metabolic demands integrated over biologically critical periods. Confounding variables in the home range-body mass regression include habitat productivity and methods of location. Data on home ranges derived from telemetry studies of terrestrial carnivores are presented and used to derive allometric equations for home range area. The exponents of these equations are shown to approximate 1.0, although intercept values vary with latitude and, presumably, habitat productivity. Social organization and behavior may also influence the relationship of home range area to metabolic needs for different sex and age categories within a species.

Space-use scaling and home range overlap in primates

“…McNab [6] estimated allometric scaling exponents close to 0.75 for both basal mammalian metabolic rate and home range, leading to the assertion that home range sizes are directly proportional to energetic requirements (see Isaac et al [12]). However, subsequent analyses have obtained exponents substantially higher than the theoretical 0.75 [9,13,14]. One explanation for this discrepancy is that home ranges include areas shared with conspecifics, and that the extent of home range overlap increases with body size [15].…”

Re-examination of the “3/4-law” of Metabolism

“…However, this result contradicts the geometric fact that transfer area can maximally scale as volume, i.e., a ∝ v, which gives α = 1. Indeed, this result is obtained by optimizing equation (13) instead of equation (14). Doing so leads to ǫ a = 1 and ǫ v = 0, assuming 0 ≤ ǫ a , ǫ v ≤ 1, which gives a ∝ M , i.e., α = 1.…”

The Scaling of Abundance in Consumers and Their Resources: Implications for the Energy Equivalence Rule

“…One of the most widely used measures of abundance is population density (McNab 1963;Damuth 1981;Peters and Raelson 1984;Lindstedt et al 1986;Silva et al 2001 extensive empirical evidence for negative scaling of species population density in relation to body size (Damuth 1987;Duarte et al 1987;Enquist et al 1998). Many have also found support for invariance in population energy use across taxa within a trophic level (Damuth 1981(Damuth , 1998Enquist et al 1998;Ackerman et al 2004), a phenomenon known as the energy equivalence rule (EER; Nee et al 1991).…”