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Insular biogeography [1] or island biogeography is a field within biogeography that examines the factors that affect the species richness and diversification of isolated natural communities. The theory was originally developed to explain the pattern of the species–area relationship occurring in oceanic islands.
Foster's rule, also known as the island rule or the island effect, is an ecogeographical rule in evolutionary biology stating that members of a species get smaller or bigger depending on the resources available in the environment. For example, it is known that pygmy mammoths evolved from normal mammoths on small islands.
The debate was triggered when Dan Simberloff and Larry Abele questioned the use of the theory of island biogeography to the design of nature reserves. The theory, developed by Robert MacArthur and E. O. Wilson predicted that the species richness of an island increases as the area of a reserve increases and distance to mainland colonizing ...
In 1975, Jared Diamond suggested some "rules" for the design of protected areas, based on Robert MacArthur and E. O. Wilson's book The Theory of Island Biogeography.One of his suggestions was that a single large reserve was preferable to several smaller reserves whose total areas were equal to the larger.
The pygmy mammoth is an example of insular dwarfism, a case of Foster's rule, its unusually small body size an adaptation to the limited resources of its island home.. A biological rule or biological law is a generalized law, principle, or rule of thumb formulated to describe patterns observed in living organisms.
Frank W. Preston, an early investigator of the theory of the species–area relationship, divided it into two types: samples (a census of a contiguous habitat that grows in the census area, also called "mainland" species–area relationships), and isolates (a census of discontiguous habitats, such as islands, also called "island" species–area ...
Size comparison of the giant gymnure (moonrat) Deinogalerix from the Late Miocene of Gargano, Italy, with a European hedgehog. Island gigantism, or insular gigantism, is a biological phenomenon in which the size of an animal species isolated on an island increases dramatically in comparison to its mainland relatives.
One classic scientific model in biogeography posits that a species must continue to colonize new areas through its life cycle (called a taxon cycle) in order to persist. Accordingly, colonisation and extinction are key components of island biogeography, a theory that has many applications in ecology, such as metapopulations. Another factor ...