According to a new study led by Alexander Dyer of the German Center for Integrated Biodiversity Research (iDiv) and Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany, published in the open access journal PLOS Biology, an animals speed is limited by how efficiently it dissipates the excess heat generated by its muscles.
An animal’s ability to travel is a key part of its survival, determining where and how far it can migrate, find food and mates, and spread into new territories. This becomes even more challenging in a human-dominated world characterized by increasingly fragmented habitats and limited food and water resources due to climate change.
Dyer and his colleagues developed a model that tracked the relationship between animal size and travel speed, using data from 532 species. While larger animals should be able to travel faster due to their longer wings, legs or tails, the researchers found that medium-sized animals typically have the highest sustained speeds.
Larger animals need more time to dissipate heat their muscles produce
Scientists attribute this to the fact that larger animals need more time to dissipate the heat their muscles produce as they move, so they must travel more slowly to avoid overheating. They concluded that the speed of any animal can be explained by a joint consideration of how efficiently it uses energy and releases heat.
“The new study provides a way to understand the movement capacities of animals across species and can be used to estimate the movement speed of any animal based on its size,” says Dyer. “For example, this approach can be used to predict whether an animal might be able to move between habitats fragmented by human development, even if the details of its biology are unknown.”
The last author Dr. Myriam Hirt from iDiv and the University of Jena adds: “We hypothesize that large animals are potentially more vulnerable to the effects of habitat fragmentation in a warming climate than previously thought, and therefore more vulnerable to extinction. But that requires further investigation.”
Read Now:ISRO release the Indian Space Policy 2023 guidelines and rules for the Indian space ecosystem
