Is Diet Quality an Overlooked Mechanism for Bergmann’s Rule?

Ho, Chuan‐Kai; Pennings, Steven C.; Carefoot, Thomas H.

doi:10.1086/649583

Cited by 81 publications

(65 citation statements)

References 59 publications

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“…Bolser and Hay, 1996), and this may be related to latitudinal patterns of body size (for a review, see Ho et al, 2010). This hypothesis was tested by Ho et al (Ho et al, 2010), who found that herbivorous ectotherms from a range of habitats (marine, terrestrial) in the Northern Hemisphere grew to larger sizes when reared on high-latitude diets. We know of no direct tests of this idea with polar organisms.…”

Section: Latitudinal Changes In Resource Qualitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Why might they be giants? Towards an understanding of polar gigantism

Moran

Woods

2012

Journal of Experimental Biology

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SummaryBeginning with the earliest expeditions to the poles, over 100years ago, scientists have compiled an impressive list of polar taxa whose body sizes are unusually large. This phenomenon has become known as ʻpolar gigantismʼ. In the intervening years, biologists have proposed a multitude of hypotheses to explain polar gigantism. These hypotheses run the gamut from invoking release from physical and physiological constraints, to systematic changes in developmental trajectories, to community-level outcomes of broader ecological and evolutionary processes. Here we review polar gigantism and emphasize two main problems. The first is to determine the true strength and generality of this pattern: how prevalent is polar gigantism across taxonomic units? Despite many published descriptions of polar giants, we still have a poor grasp of whether these species are unusual outliers or represent more systematic shifts in distributions of body size. Indeed, current data indicate that some groups show gigantism at the poles whereas others show nanism. The second problem is to identify underlying mechanisms or processes that could drive taxa, or even just allow them, to evolve especially large body size. The contenders are diverse and no clear winner has yet emerged. Distinguishing among the contenders will require better sampling of taxa in both temperate and polar waters and sustained efforts by comparative physiologists and evolutionary ecologists in a strongly comparative framework.

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Section: Latitudinal Changes In Resource Qualitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Why might they be giants? Towards an understanding of polar gigantism

Moran

Woods

2012

Journal of Experimental Biology

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“…Angilletta 2004, Chown andGaston 2009). Explanations include diVerent temperature eVects on growth and diVerentiation (van der Have and de Jong 1996), oxygen availability constraints on cell size (Woods 1999;Chapelle and Peck 1999, Peck and Chapelle 2003Peck and Maddrell 2005), energy use (Brown et al 2004), abundance (White et al 2007), diet quality (Ho et al 2010), geographic range size or through increased fecundity or survival in cold environments (Stearns 1992). The various explanations are reviewed in Angilletta (2004), but there is still no consensus and either diVerent factors are important in diVerent groups or multiple factors interact to give the eVect.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Variation in size of living articulated brachiopods with latitude and depth

Peck

Harper

2010

Mar Biol

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Geographical variations in animal characters are one of the main subjects for study in macroecology. Variation with latitude has received special interest. Articulated brachiopods are possibly the commonest macrofossil with large variations in size of taxa through the fossil record. Here, we investigate trends in size of the 3 main orders of articulated brachiopod with latitude and depth. Data were insuYcient to identify patterns in Thecideida (a micromorph taxon only recorded from low latitudes). Rhynchonellida had no clear trends in size with latitude or depth. Terebratulida exhibited hemispheric diVerences in size relations, with increasing length of species towards the pole in the south and no signiWcant trend in the north. Tropical species were small (<20 mm length between 10°N and 10°S), and the largest species were found between 30° and 60° latitude in both hemispheres. There were no articulated brachiopods recorded from the high arctic, and support for a continuous trend in size with latitude was small or absent. In Terebratulida, there was a signiWcant decrease in species length with depth of 1.7 mm per 100 m depth increase. These trends could be explained by competition for space and reduced availability of habitat with progressive depth beyond the continental shelf.

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“…While the effects of latitude were not as dramatic as that of fertilizer addition, low-latitude plants were consistently larger, but lower in nitrogen, at the end of the experiment. Although high-latitude plants are higher in nitrogen, lower in phenolics and more palatable than low-latitude plants (Pennings, Siska & Bertness 2001;Siska et al 2002;Salgado & Pennings 2005), and although these differences are sufficient to cause geographic variation in herbivore body size (Ho, Pennings & Carefoot 2010), they were nevertheless overwhelmed in our experiments by fertilizer-induced nutritional status and food web composition. These findings are similar to those in our previous work with the high-marsh shrub Iva frutescens (Marczak et al 2011), where we found that latitudinal variation in plant quality had much smaller effects on herbivore Table 3.…”

Section: O C a L N O T G E O G R A P H I C S O U R C E S O F B mentioning

confidence: 75%

“…Predation pressure can be important, but only on low-quality plants, because herbivores escape from predator control on high-quality plants. Similarly, although plants demonstrably vary in quality across latitude, and this has measurable effects on herbivore performance (Ho, Pennings & Carefoot 2010), the effects of latitudinal variation on herbivore abundance tend to be overwhelmed by other factors.…”

Section: O M P a R I N G L O C A L A N D G E O G R A P H I C P A T mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our experiments did not address factors extrinsic to the food web such as climate, but the short growing season and colder winters at high latitudes are the most likely reasons why high latitudes are characterized by a reduced number of generations in multivoltine species such as Prokelisia (Friedenberg et al 2008), a reduced body size of some univoltine species such as Orchelimum (Wason & Pennings 2008;Ho, Pennings & Carefoot 2010) and a reduced density of some other members of the food web (Pennings et al 2009;McCall & Pennings 2012).…”

Section: O M P a R I N G L O C A L A N D G E O G R A P H I C P A T mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Importance of local vs. geographic variation in salt marsh plant quality for arthropod herbivore communities

et al. 2013

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Summary1. An important recent advance in food web ecology has been the application of theory regarding spatial gradients to studies of the factors that affect animal population dynamics. Building on extensive studies of the Spartina alterniflora food web at the local scale, we hypothesized that geographic variation in S. alterniflora quality is an important bottom-up control on food web structure and that geographic variation in S. alterniflora quality would interact with the presence of predators and top omnivores to mediate herbivore densities. 2. We employed a four-factor fully crossed experiment in which we (i) collected plants from highand low-latitude locations and grew them in a common garden and varied (ii) plant fertilization status (mimicking the plant quality differences due to marsh elevation), (iii) mesopredator density and (iv) omnivore density. 3. Our results suggest that the single most important factor mediating insect herbivore densities is local variation in plant quality -induced in our experiment by fertilization and demonstrated repeatedly as a consequence of marsh elevation. 4. Top-down effects were generally weak and in those cases where predators did exert a significant suppressing effect on herbivores, that impact was itself mediated by host-plant characteristics. 5. Finally, despite observed variation in plant quality with latitude, and the separately measurable effects of this variation on herbivores, geographic-scale variation in plant quality was overwhelmed by local conditions in our experiments. 6. Synthesis. We suggest that a first-order understanding of variation across large latitudinal ranges in the Spartina alterniflora arthropod food web must begin with local variation in plant quality, which provides strong bottom-up forcing to herbivore populations. A second-order understanding of the arthropod food web should consider the role of predation in controlling herbivores feeding on lowquality plants. Finally, while latitudinal variation in plant quality probably explains some variation in herbivore densities, it is probably more of a response to herbivore pressure than a driver of the herbivore dynamics. Although extrapolating from local to geographic scales presents multiple challenges, it is an essential task in order for us to develop an understanding that is general rather than site-specific.

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Is Diet Quality an Overlooked Mechanism for Bergmann’s Rule?

Cited by 81 publications

References 59 publications

Why might they be giants? Towards an understanding of polar gigantism

Why might they be giants? Towards an understanding of polar gigantism

Variation in size of living articulated brachiopods with latitude and depth

Importance of local vs. geographic variation in salt marsh plant quality for arthropod herbivore communities

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