ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2021
Mammalian intestinal allometry, phylogeny, trophic level and climate.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Intraspecific Trait Variation in the Mammalian Gastrointestinal Tract: A Digestive Dive and Systematic Literature Review.Integrative and comparative biology · 2026Pooled it
- Feeding biomechanics in vertebrates and beyond.Anatomical record (Hoboken, N.J. : 2007) · 2026Article
- Host phylogeny and microbiome composition predict gut nematode community composition within a diverse assemblage of African herbivores.Biology letters · 2026Article
- Deficiency of Natural Plant-Derived Gut Metabolites Is a Potential Cause of Skeletal Deformities in Captive-Bred Green Peafowl (Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2026Article
- Host phylogeny and diet shape gut microbiome and virome in wild small mammals of Gongga Mountain, China.Zoological research · 2026Article
- Amphibian Intestine Allometry.Journal of morphology · 2026Article
- Exploring the impact of collagen-I genetic variants on intestinal structure and gut microbiota in mouse models of osteogenesis imperfecta.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Comparative transcriptomics reveal the common anteroposterior molecular blueprint of adult bilaterian guts.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- A quantitative risk assessment framework for mortality due to macroplastic ingestion in seabirds, marine mammals, and sea turtles.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Phenotypic and developmental dissection of an instance of the island rule.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2025Article
- Article
- Phenotypic and Developmental Dissection of an Instance of the Island Rule.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Digestive anatomy and diet of free-ranging maned wolf (Mammalian biology = Zeitschrift fur Saugetierkunde · 2025Article
- Gastrointestinal morphology is an effective functional dietary proxy that predicts small mammal community structure.Ecology · 2024Article
- Anatomical description of neornithine stomach with implications on neornithine stomach morphology.Journal of anatomy · 2024Article
- Vascularization of the gastrointestinal tract of the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus, Montagu 1821).Journal of anatomy · 2024Article
- Thiamin (vitamin B1, thiamine) transfer in the aquatic food web from lower to higher trophic levels.PloS one · 2024Article
- Diet and habitat as determinants of intestine length in fishes.Reviews in fish biology and fisheries · 2024Article
- Teeth and the gastrointestinal tract in mammals: when 1 + 1 = 3.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Seasonal and sex-specific changes in the gastrointestinal tracts ofJournal of mammalogy · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
An often-stated ecomorphological assumption that has the status of 'textbook knowledge' is that the dimensions of the digestive tract correlate with diet, where herbivores-consuming diets of lower digestibility-have longer intestinal tracts than faunivores-consuming diets of higher digestibility. However, statistical approaches have so far failed to demonstrate this link. Here, we collated data on the length of intestinal sections and body mass of 519 mammal species, and test for various relationships with trophic, climatic and other biological characteristics. All models showed a strong phylogenetic signal. Scaling relationships with body mass showed positive allometry at exponents greater than 0.33, except for the caecum, which is particularly large in smaller species. Body mass was more tightly linked to small intestine than to large intestine length. Adding a diet proxy to the relationships increased model fit for all intestinal sections, except for the small intestine when accounting for phylogeny. Thus, the diet has a main effect on the components of the large intestine, with longer measures in herbivores. Additionally, measures of habitat aridity had a positive relationship with large intestine length. The small intestine was longer in species from colder habitats at higher latitudes, possibly facilitating the processing of peak intake rates during the growing season. This study corroborates intuitive expectations on digestive tract anatomy, while the dependence of significant results on large sample sizes and inclusion of specific taxonomic groups indicates that the relationships cannot be considered fixed biological laws.
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