Data from: Energy and the scaling of animal space use

Daily animal movements are usually limited to a discrete home range area
that scales allometrically with body size, suggesting that home-range size
is shaped by metabolic rates and energy availability across species.
However, there is little understanding of the relative importance of the
various mechanisms proposed to influence home-range scaling (e.g.,
differences in realm productivity, thermoregulation, locomotion strategy,
dimensionality, trophic guild, and prey size) and whether these extend
beyond the commonly studied birds and mammals. We derive new home-range
scaling relationships for fishes and reptiles and use a model-selection
approach to evaluate the generality of home-range scaling mechanisms
across 569 vertebrate species. We find no evidence that home-range
allometry varies consistently between aquatic and terrestrial realms or
thermoregulation strategies, but we find that locomotion strategy,
foraging dimension, trophic guild, and prey size together explain 80% of
the variation in home-range size across vertebrates when controlling for
phylogeny and tracking method. Within carnivores, smaller relative prey
size among gape-limited fishes contributes to shallower scaling relative
to other predators. Our study reveals how simple morphological traits and
prey-handling ability can profoundly influence individual space use, which
underpins broader-scale patterns in the spatial ecology of vertebrates.