All articles tagged with #body size
A study reveals that anacondas have maintained an average length of 13-16 feet for the past 12 million years, indicating their size has remained remarkably constant since the Miocene epoch, despite environmental changes and other species going extinct.
Scientists at Rockefeller University discovered that in ant colonies, body size plays a crucial role in determining caste, with larger ants tending to develop queen-like traits, influenced by both size and genetics. Using clonal raider ants, which reproduce asexually, they found that environmental factors affect size but genes set the rules for when size triggers queen development, revealing a complex interplay between genetics and environment in social insect caste determination.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams has signed a bill that will prohibit discrimination based on body size by adding weight and height to the list of protected categories such as race, sex, and religion. The ordinance will take effect in 180 days, on Nov. 22, and exemptions include cases in which an individual’s height or weight could prevent them from performing essential functions of a job. The move has been praised by fat-acceptance advocates and could serve as a model for other cities and states.
A new study by Adelphi University reveals that sauropod dinosaurs, including Brachiosaurus and Apatosaurus, achieved their record-breaking sizes over time through around three dozen instances of independent evolution over the course of 100 million years around the globe. The study contradicts Cope's rule, which suggests that animals' size evolves over time, and instead sees animals achieving different body sizes depending on their ecological context and whatever niches happened to be available. The next step in the research is to untangle why certain lineages evolved their super-giant sizes while others didn't.
Male California sea lions have increased their body size over the last 50 years, contrary to the expected reduction in size due to population growth. Researchers attribute this to the species' dietary flexibility and abundance of prey along the western coast of the US. The increase in body size is scientifically significant but not too obvious for observers. The study analyzed more than 300 sea lion skulls and found no increase in females' body size, likely due to different evolutionary selection pressures.
A new study has revealed that the Antarctic minke whale, the smallest of the baleen whales, has the smallest possible body size to capture enough prey to survive using the foraging behavior called lunge-feeding. The research showed that all filter-feeding whales are big, and that animals must have attained a large size before the unique behavior of lunge-feeding evolved. The repeated lunging requires a high investment of energy, and the efficiency of foraging this way favors a larger body size.