The Evolution of Body Size: What Keeps Organisms Small?

By W. Blanckenhorn. The Quarterly review of biology, 2000

1,264 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It is widely agreed that fecundity selection and sexual selection are the major evolutionary forces that select for larger body size in most organisms. The general, equilibrium view is that selection for large body size is eventually counterbalanced by opposing selective forces. While the evidence for selection favoring larger body size is overwhelming, counterbalancing selection favoring small body size is often masked by the good condition of the larger organism and is therefore less obvious. The suggested costs of large size are: (1) viability costs in juveniles due to long development and/or fast growth; (2) viability costs in adults and juveniles due to predation, parasitism, or starvation because of reduced agility, increased detectability, higher energy requirements, heat stress, and/or intrinsic costs of reproduction; (3) decreased mating success of large males due to reduced agility and/or high energy requirements; and (4) decreased reproductive success of large females and males due to late reproduction. A review of the literature indicates a substantial lack of empirical evidence for these various mechanisms and highlights the need for experimental studies that specifically address the fitness costs of being large at the ecological, physiological, and genetic levels. Specifically, theoretical investigations and comprehensive case studies of particular model species are needed to elucidate whether sporadic selection in time and space is sufficient to counterbalance perpetual and strong selection for large body size.

Subfields: Ecology

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Citations in the corpus

Larval instar as a key element of insect growth schedules (2006, background): “These disadvantages often operate through the viability cost, as large size, for several reasons, may lower the probability of survival (Blanckenhorn 2000 and references therein).”
What limits insect fecundity? Body size- and temperature-dependent egg maturation and oviposition in a butterfly (2008, background): “Optimality models, however, often fail to explain why insects do not evolve to be larger (Blanckenhorn 2000).”
Cross-Cultural Variation in Mate Preferences for Averageness, Symmetry, Body Size, and Masculinity (2013, background): “Although being tall can be beneficial to men, at least in North America and Europe, a large body size comes at a cost that not all populations of people may be equally equipped to bear (Blanckenhorn, 2000).”
The evolution of geographic variation in birdsong (2007, background): “Body size, to illustrat e, evolve s in many animals in response to a range of selective factors such as thermoregulation, fecundity, reproductive rate, and dispersal (Blanckenhorn, 2000; Roff, 1992).”
The significance of body size in the Orthoptera: a review (2008, background): “Why do Orthoptera have small males? Small males may benefit from lower predation rates or food requirements (Blanckenhorn 2000), from reduced ecological competition with females, from greater agility or mobility (Kelly et al.”
Growth strategies of ectothermic animals in temperate environments (2001, background): “However, there is still a lack of basic empirical information such as quantitative estimates of how fitness depends on body size, development time and juvenile growth rate in a more natural setting (Abrams et al., 1996; Leimar, 1996; Tammaru et al., 1996; Tammaru, 1997; Blanckenhorn, 2000 ).”
Body size evolution in insects with different colouration strategies: the role of predation risk (2009, positive): “While selection for larger body size is often easy to detect and can be fairly consistent across species, the counterbalancing factors tend to be much less obvious (Blanckenhorn 2000, Tammaru et al. 2002).”
Size dependent predation risk in cryptic and conspicuous insects (2007, background): “Locating these costs has turned out to be a surprisingly non-trivial question, however (Leimar 1996; Blanckenhorn 2000; Tammaru et al. 2002; Gotthard 2004).”
DEMOGRAPHIC AND EVOLUTIONARY IMPACTS OF NATIVE AND INVASIVE INSECT HERBIVORES ON CIRSIUM CANESCENS (2005, background): “This problem led Blanckenhorn (2000) to conclude that ‘‘Detection of pre-reproductive viability selection against large body size . . . is therefore difficult.’’”
Food and sex-specific growth strategies in a spider (2004, background): “It is generally agreed that large female size is primarily fecundity selected and large male size primarily sexually selected (Blanckenhorn, 2000).”
Size, temperature, and fitness: Three rules (2008, background): “Moreover, long developmental times necessary to achieve large size may lengthen exposure of vulnerable developmental stages to natural enemies, and thus reduce the likelihood of successful mating and reproduction (Blanckenhorn, 2000) .”
The non-linear relationship between body size and function in parrotfishes (2008, background): “…disproportional eVect is likely to be explained by the laws of bioenergetics (i.e., increasing energy requirement with increasing biomass) (e.g., Blanckenhorn 2000) and perhaps also by the fact that scraping requires a certain force that may only be achieved by parrotWshes with suYciently…”