ArticleOecologia2015
Andrew meets Rensch: sexual size dimorphism and the inverse of Rensch's rule in Andrew's toad (Bufo andrewsi).
Article in Oecologia, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 84 citations in OpenAlex.
- Variations in Sexual Size Dimorphism in Two Anurans Along an Urbanization Gradient in Shanghai: Assessment of Rensch's Rule.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Sexual Size Dimorphism in Rays and Skates (Elasmobranchii: Batoidea).Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Patterns of sexual dimorphism in the armoured tardigrades.Biology letters · 2024Article
- Size Gynomimicry in the Sanmartinero Creole Bovine of the Colombian Orinoquia.Veterinary sciences · 2024Article
- Age structure and body size of two Tibetan toad (Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Sharks Violate Rensch's Rule for Sexual Size Dimorphism.Integrative organismal biology (Oxford, England) · 2024Article
- Geographical Variation in Body Size in the Asian Common Toad (Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Sexual Dimorphism in the Limb Bones of Asiatic Toad (Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
- Geographic Variation in Organ Size in a Toad (Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
- Article
- Influence of microhabitat, fecundity, and parental care on the evolution of sexual size dimorphism in Caribbean Eleutherodactylus frogs.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2022Article
- Testis Size Variation and Its Environmental Correlates in Andrew's Toad (Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- Sexual size dimorphism and male reproductive traits vary across populations of a tropical rainforest dung beetle species (Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Seasonal Variation in Gut Microbiota Related to Diet inAnimals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2021Article
- Female-biased gape and body-size dimorphism in the New World watersnakes (tribe: Thamnophiini) oppose predictions from Rensch's rule.Ecology and evolution · 2019Article
- Modulation of Gene Expression in Liver of Hibernating Asiatic Toads (International journal of molecular sciences · 2018Article
- Function-related Drivers of Skull Morphometric Variation and Sexual Size Dimorphism in a Subterranean Rodent, Plateau Zokor (Ecology and evolution · 2018Article
- Modelling the growth of the brown frog (PeerJ · 2018Article
- Seasonality and brain size are negatively associated in frogs: evidence for the expensive brain framework.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- Geographic variation in life-history traits: growth season affects age structure, egg size and clutch size in Andrew's toad (Bufo andrewsi).Frontiers in zoology · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Variation in sexual size dimorphism (SSD) is a widespread phenomenon and is commonly attributed to variation in sex-specific patterns of selection. According to Rensch's rule, SSD increases with increasing body size when males are the larger sex, and decreases when females are the larger sex. Using data from 17 populations of Andrew's toad (Bufo andrewsi), we tested whether the patterns of SSD conform to Rensch's rule. Using field experiments, we also evaluated the hypothesis that sexual selection favours large male body size and that fecundity selection favours large female body size. The results revealed that the degree of SSD increased with increasing mean size in females, consistent with the inverse of Rensch's rule. Although experiments revealed evidence for a large-male mating advantage, selection for large male size was weak at best, and hence unlikely to be an important source of variation in SSD. However, fecundity selection favouring large females was evident, and likely to explain the observed inverse of Rensch's rule. After correcting male and female body size for age differences, the patterns of SSD remained the same, suggesting that the intra- and interpopulational variation in SSD is not driven by sex differences in age structure. Hence, these findings suggest that the strong fecundity selection favouring large females drives the evolution of female-biased SSD in B. andrewsi, providing an explanation for the inverse of Rensch's rule. As such, the study provides an important addition to the small body of literature that uses an intraspecific approach to demonstrate the inverse of Rensch's rule.
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