An Intercontinental Analysis of Climate-Driven Body Size Clines in Reptiles: No Support for Patterns, No Signals of Processes

Abstract

Climatic gradients impose clinal selection on animal ecological and physiological performance, often promoting geographic body size clines. Bergmann’s rule predicts that body size increases with decreasing environmental temperatures given the need to retain body-heat through adjustments of body-mass-to-surface-area ratio. This prediction generally holds for endotherms, but remains controversial for ectotherms. An alternative interpretation, the ‘resource rule’, suggests that food abundance, primary productivity and precipitation (which, unlike temperature, do not necessarily correlate with geography), drive body size clines. We investigate geographic variation in body size within 65 species of lizards and snakes (squamates) based on an intercontinental dataset (6,500+ specimens belonging to 56 Israeli species, and multiple populations of nine Liolaemus species from Argentina and Chile). Bergmann’s rule is only rarely supported by our data (in four species, 6 %), whereas six species (9 %) follow its converse (hence, it is unsupported in 94 % of cases). Similarly, size increases with resource abundance in only 12 species (18 %). Therefore, although neither of the rules is supported, factors suggested by the resource rule are better predictors of body size than temperature. Surprisingly, we show that some measures of the extent of a species’ climatic envelope do not affect the likelihood of it showing a size-climate relationship. We conclude that negative size-temperature associations are an exception rather than a generality among squamates.