| Popis: |
Many important aspects of an organism’s life are closely related to its body size. As aconsequence, size can be considered a driving factor on evolutionary history of animals,and some important ecological patterns have been proposed based on this measure.Recently, the Metabolic Theory of Ecology (MTE) suggests that higher metabolic ratesare associated with small body sizes and this would determine species distributionpatterns. Following the MTE, smaller animals should occupy smaller areas. Aremarkably wide body size range can be seen on varanoid lizards. They also occupy alarge variety of habitats and seem to have a very early origin, being good models forevolutionary ecology studies. We used the most recent Varanidae phylogeny to test ifdistribution areas reflect body mass variation. Because there is an ongoing debate aboutthe taxonomic status of some species, we treated these as groups. We used thephylogenetic eigenvector regression method (PVR) both to detect and removephylogenetic inertia in body and range size. The hypothesis was then tested by aSpearman correlation test using the PVR residuals. The PVR analysisindicatedphylogenetic inertia on both variables (area: R²=0.68, p |
