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Allen's rule - Hare and its ears on the Earth [1]. Allen's rule is an ecogeographical rule formulated by Joel Asaph Allen in 1877, [2] [3] broadly stating that animals adapted to cold climates have shorter and thicker limbs and bodily appendages than animals adapted to warm climates.
Environmental temperature is one of the most important proximate factors affecting ectotherm body size because of their need to thermoregulate. Individuals that have been observed to follow the temperature-size rule have slower growth rates in colder environments, yet they enter a period of prolonged growth that yields larger adult body sizes.
Other scientists have criticized the assertion that population growth is a key driver for biodiversity loss. [13] They argue that the main driver is the loss of habitat, caused by "the growth of commodities for export, particularly soybean and oil-palm, primarily for livestock feed or biofuel consumption in higher income economies."
Small animals tend to grow fast, breed early, and die young. [27] According to MTE, these patterns in life history traits are constrained by metabolism. [28] An organism's metabolic rate determines its rate of food consumption, which in turn determines its rate of growth. This increased growth rate produces trade-offs that accelerate senescence.
Many factors go into the determination of body mass and size for a given animal. These factors often affect body size on an evolutionary scale, but conditions such as availability of food and habitat size can act much more quickly on a species. Other examples include the following: Physiological design
At small spatial scales (e.g. a dozen hectares or a local community) the body size-species richness pattern dissolves and the number of species per body size class is almost uniform (i.e. there is an equal number of small and large bodied species in the community (see fig. 2 b)).
Growth rate. This measures the growth of individuals in size and length. This is important in fisheries where the population is often measured in terms of biomass. Mortality. This includes harvest mortality and natural mortality. Natural mortality includes non-human predation, disease and old age.
Liebig's law states that growth only occurs at the rate permitted by the most limiting factor. [ 2 ] For instance, in the equation below, the growth of population O {\displaystyle O} is a function of the minimum of three Michaelis-Menten terms representing limitation by factors I {\displaystyle I} , N {\displaystyle N} and P {\displaystyle P} .