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| Gaston, K.J.; Blackburn, T.M. | |
| Conservation Implications of Geographic Range Size-Body Size Relationships | |
| 1996 Conservation Biology (10): 638-646 | |
The oft-cited statement that "big fierce animals are rare" is, like most such generalizations in ecology, only partially correct. Animals with large bodies, fierce or otherwise, do have lower densities than smaller species, at least in studies based on compendia of data drawn from the literature. Conclusions may be rather different when based on sampling whole assemblages of taxonomically similar animals. However, a growing body of work has documented positive relationships between geographic range size and the body size of animal species. In terms of geographic range size,within taxonomic assemblages big animals are often rather common; geographic range size is a dimension of the rare-common axis equally as valid, and perhaps as widely applied, as density or population size. Moreover, at least amongst terrestrial mammals, the big fierce species may tend to have particularly large geographic ranges on average than species in other terrestrial mammalian orders. The relationship between interspecific geographic range size and body size has attracted attention primarily in the context of macroecology and may explain how species partition space and resources. It has some potentially important consequences for conservation. We limit ourselves here to consideration of interspecific range size to body size relationships from studies on assemblages at large geographic scales, such that all or most of the geographic ranges of the species in the assemblage are considered. It is on global, rather than local, scales that the conservation status of species is most important. At more restricted scales the form of the range size to body size relationship is less clear. |
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