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Sizing ocean giants: patterns of intraspecific size variation in marine megafauna
What are the greatest sizes that the largest marine megafauna obtain? This is a simple question with a difficult and complex answer. Many of the largest-sized species occur in the world’s oceans. For many of these, rarity, remoteness, and quite simply the logistics of measuring these giants has made...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
PeerJ Inc.
2015
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4304853/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25649000 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.715 |
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author | McClain, Craig R. Balk, Meghan A. Benfield, Mark C. Branch, Trevor A. Chen, Catherine Cosgrove, James Dove, Alistair D.M. Gaskins, Leo Helm, Rebecca R. Hochberg, Frederick G. Lee, Frank B. Marshall, Andrea McMurray, Steven E. Schanche, Caroline Stone, Shane N. Thaler, Andrew D. |
author_facet | McClain, Craig R. Balk, Meghan A. Benfield, Mark C. Branch, Trevor A. Chen, Catherine Cosgrove, James Dove, Alistair D.M. Gaskins, Leo Helm, Rebecca R. Hochberg, Frederick G. Lee, Frank B. Marshall, Andrea McMurray, Steven E. Schanche, Caroline Stone, Shane N. Thaler, Andrew D. |
author_sort | McClain, Craig R. |
collection | PubMed |
description | What are the greatest sizes that the largest marine megafauna obtain? This is a simple question with a difficult and complex answer. Many of the largest-sized species occur in the world’s oceans. For many of these, rarity, remoteness, and quite simply the logistics of measuring these giants has made obtaining accurate size measurements difficult. Inaccurate reports of maximum sizes run rampant through the scientific literature and popular media. Moreover, how intraspecific variation in the body sizes of these animals relates to sex, population structure, the environment, and interactions with humans remains underappreciated. Here, we review and analyze body size for 25 ocean giants ranging across the animal kingdom. For each taxon we document body size for the largest known marine species of several clades. We also analyze intraspecific variation and identify the largest known individuals for each species. Where data allows, we analyze spatial and temporal intraspecific size variation. We also provide allometric scaling equations between different size measurements as resources to other researchers. In some cases, the lack of data prevents us from fully examining these topics and instead we specifically highlight these deficiencies and the barriers that exist for data collection. Overall, we found considerable variability in intraspecific size distributions from strongly left- to strongly right-skewed. We provide several allometric equations that allow for estimation of total lengths and weights from more easily obtained measurements. In several cases, we also quantify considerable geographic variation and decreases in size likely attributed to humans. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-4304853 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2015 |
publisher | PeerJ Inc. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-43048532015-02-03 Sizing ocean giants: patterns of intraspecific size variation in marine megafauna McClain, Craig R. Balk, Meghan A. Benfield, Mark C. Branch, Trevor A. Chen, Catherine Cosgrove, James Dove, Alistair D.M. Gaskins, Leo Helm, Rebecca R. Hochberg, Frederick G. Lee, Frank B. Marshall, Andrea McMurray, Steven E. Schanche, Caroline Stone, Shane N. Thaler, Andrew D. PeerJ Biodiversity What are the greatest sizes that the largest marine megafauna obtain? This is a simple question with a difficult and complex answer. Many of the largest-sized species occur in the world’s oceans. For many of these, rarity, remoteness, and quite simply the logistics of measuring these giants has made obtaining accurate size measurements difficult. Inaccurate reports of maximum sizes run rampant through the scientific literature and popular media. Moreover, how intraspecific variation in the body sizes of these animals relates to sex, population structure, the environment, and interactions with humans remains underappreciated. Here, we review and analyze body size for 25 ocean giants ranging across the animal kingdom. For each taxon we document body size for the largest known marine species of several clades. We also analyze intraspecific variation and identify the largest known individuals for each species. Where data allows, we analyze spatial and temporal intraspecific size variation. We also provide allometric scaling equations between different size measurements as resources to other researchers. In some cases, the lack of data prevents us from fully examining these topics and instead we specifically highlight these deficiencies and the barriers that exist for data collection. Overall, we found considerable variability in intraspecific size distributions from strongly left- to strongly right-skewed. We provide several allometric equations that allow for estimation of total lengths and weights from more easily obtained measurements. In several cases, we also quantify considerable geographic variation and decreases in size likely attributed to humans. PeerJ Inc. 2015-01-13 /pmc/articles/PMC4304853/ /pubmed/25649000 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.715 Text en © 2015 McClain et al. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited. |
spellingShingle | Biodiversity McClain, Craig R. Balk, Meghan A. Benfield, Mark C. Branch, Trevor A. Chen, Catherine Cosgrove, James Dove, Alistair D.M. Gaskins, Leo Helm, Rebecca R. Hochberg, Frederick G. Lee, Frank B. Marshall, Andrea McMurray, Steven E. Schanche, Caroline Stone, Shane N. Thaler, Andrew D. Sizing ocean giants: patterns of intraspecific size variation in marine megafauna |
title | Sizing ocean giants: patterns of intraspecific size variation in marine megafauna |
title_full | Sizing ocean giants: patterns of intraspecific size variation in marine megafauna |
title_fullStr | Sizing ocean giants: patterns of intraspecific size variation in marine megafauna |
title_full_unstemmed | Sizing ocean giants: patterns of intraspecific size variation in marine megafauna |
title_short | Sizing ocean giants: patterns of intraspecific size variation in marine megafauna |
title_sort | sizing ocean giants: patterns of intraspecific size variation in marine megafauna |
topic | Biodiversity |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4304853/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25649000 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.715 |
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