ArticleThe American naturalist2012
The starvation-predation trade-off predicts trends in body size, muscularity, and adiposity between and within Taxa.
Article in The American naturalist, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 50 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Sugar Addiction: From Evolution to Revolution.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2018Review
- An adaptive response to uncertainty can lead to weight gain during dieting attempts.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2016Article
- Daily Activity and Nest Occupation Patterns of Fox Squirrels (Sciurus niger) throughout the Year.PloS one · 2016Article
- Costs of Foraging Predispose Animals to Obesity-Related Mortality when Food Is Constantly Abundant.PloS one · 2015Article
- Motion sickness: more than nausea and vomiting.Experimental brain research · 2014Article
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3 authors at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
The storage of lipids to buffer energy shortage may incur such costs as increased vulnerability to predation, and animals may be more muscular in order to reduce such costs. If muscle and lipid mass interact to determine survival, then both the muscularity and the adiposity of animals will be affected by factors such as predator density and food availability. Here we explore how adiposity and muscularity may depend on such factors. We confirm the expectation that adiposity should decrease with the risk of predation and increase with the frequency of interruptions to the food supply. More surprisingly, the predicted relationships between skeletal size, muscularity, and adiposity qualitatively depended on various factors: for example, adiposity should increase with foraging costs only for small animals and should decrease with total body mass if competition for food is intense. Furthermore, if the locomotive costs of carrying lipids are low, then adiposity should increase with body mass, whereas if such costs are high, then adiposity should decrease with body mass. These predictions are supported by observations of variation between and within species. Our approach demonstrates that broad patterns of body composition can be understood in terms of the fundamental ecological trade-off between starvation and predation.
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