10.5061/DRYAD.1TH6K
Nespolo, Roberto F.
University Austral de Chile
González-Lagos, Cesar
Center of Applied Ecology and Sustainability (CAPES), Facultad de
Ciencias Biológicas, Universidad Católica de Chile
Solano-Iguaran, Jaiber J.
University Austral de Chile
Elfwing, Magnus
Linköping University
Garitano-Zavala, Alvaro
Instituto de Ecología
Mañosa, Santiago
University of Barcelona
Alonso, Juan Carlos
Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales
Altamiras, Jordi
Linköping University
Data from: Aerobic power and flight capacity in birds: a phylogenetic test
of the heart-size hypothesis
Dryad
dataset
2017
OU models
heart size
comparative phylogenetics
aerobic power
2017-11-15T14:14:37Z
2017-11-15T14:14:37Z
en
https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.162693
827697 bytes
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CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication
Flight capacity is one of the most important innovations in animal
evolution; it only evolved in insects, birds, mammals and the extinct
pterodactyls. Given that powered flight represents a demanding aerobic
activity, an efficient cardiovascular system is essential for the
continuous delivery of oxygen to the pectoral muscles during flight. It is
well known that the limiting step in the circulation is stroke volume (the
volume of blood pumped from the ventricle to the body during each beat),
which is determined by the size of the ventricle. Thus, the fresh mass of
the heart represents a simple and repeatable anatomic measure of aerobic
power of an animal. Although several authors have already compared heart
masses across bird species, a phylogenetic comparative analysis of these
comparisons is still lacking. Compiling heart sizes for 915 species and
applying several statistical procedures controlling for body size and/or
testing for adaptive trends in the dataset (e.g., model selection
approaches, phylogenetic generalized linear models), we found that
(residuals of) heart sizes are consistently associated with four
categories of flight capacity. In general, our results indicate that
species exhibiting continuous hovering flight (i.e., hummingbirds) have
substantially larger hearts than do other groups, that species that use
flapping flight and gliding show intermediate values, and that species
categorized as poor flyers show the smallest values. Our study shows that
at a broad scale, routine flight modes seem to have shaped the energetic
requirements of birds sufficiently to be anatomically detected at the
comparative level.
Supplementary MaterialClassification criteria for flight mode (extended)
and complete list of species including flight mode, migration class, body
mass (BM) and heart mass (HM) and the respective source of information.