Phenotypic and developmental dissection of an instance of the island rule.

ABSTRACT: Organismal body weight correlates with morphology, life history, physiology, and behavior, making it perhaps the most telling single indicator of an organism's evolutionary and ecological profile. Island populations provide an exceptional opportunity to study body weight evolution. In accord with the "island rule," insular small-bodied vertebrates often evolve larger sizes, whereas insular large-bodied vertebrates evolve smaller sizes. To understand how island populations evolve to extreme sizes, we adopted a developmental perspective and compared a suite of traits with established connections to body size in the world's largest wild house mice from Gough Island and mice from a smaller-bodied mainland strain. We pinpoint 24-h periods during the third and fifth week of age in which Gough mi

SUBMITTER: Nolte MJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12466620 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature