Foraging specialization and body size in seabirds
Hernandez, J. C.; Arroyo, J. I.
Show abstract
Body size affects many biological processes since it predicts traits, timing, and biological rates. Some of these relationships are explained by the metabolic theory of ecology, which predicts that they should scale according to a power law with exponents multiples of [Formula]. Here we study the relationships between foraging specialization, particularly the number of dietary categories and prey capture strategies, and seabird species size, based on a database of 342 species (representing more than 95 % of all species). In our analysis, we found a negative relationship between the number of dietary categories and the number of capture strategies with body size with exponents of -0.83{+/-}0.31 and -0.76{+/-}0.06. To explain these relationships in terms of first principles, we developed a simple model to explain the origin of this scaling based on well-established ecological scaling relationships. Our study suggests that foraging specialization is constrained by the energy used by an organism, providing a basis for future theoretical developments.
Matching journals
The top 7 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
Similar papers in this journal
Similar papers in this journal
- Effects of local versus global competition on reproductive skew and sex differences in social dominance behaviour 94%
- From friend to foe and back - Coevolutionary transitions in the mutualism-antagonism continuum 94%
- Mutation bias can shape adaptation in large asexual populations experiencing clonal interference 93%
Similar papers in this journal
"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.