Accounting for age: uncovering the nuanced drivers of mammal body-size responses to climate change.

ABSTRACT: Shifts in mean body size coinciding with environmental change are well documented across animal species and populations, serving as a widespread and complex indicator of climate-change response. In mammal research, identifying and disentangling the potential drivers of these trends (e.g., thermoregulation, resource availability) is hindered by treating adult size as fixed, ignoring morphological changes that occur throughout life in many species. However, observed population-level size trends may reflect underlying shifts in age structure (i.e., change in the proportion of older, potentially larger individuals in the population). Here, we assessed the role of age structure by explicitly evaluating age as a contributor to temporal variation in skull size (a proxy for body size) in 2 carnivo

SUBMITTER: Theriot MK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11491926 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature