Humans Disrupting 66-Million-Year-Old Feature of Ecosystems
Published:26 Apr.2022 Source:University of Nebraska-Lincoln
The U-shaped relationship between diet and size in modern land mammals could also stand for "universal," says a new study, which has found that the relationship spans at least 66 million years and a range of vertebrate animal groups.
It's been several decades since ecologists realized that graphing the diet-size relationship of terrestrial mammals yields a U-shaped curve when aligning those mammals on a plant-to-protein gradient. As illustrated by that curve, the plant-eating herbivores on the far left and meat-eating carnivores on the far right tend to reach sizes much larger than those of the all-consuming omnivores and the invertebrate-feasting invertivores in the middle.