Body mass of 30 Canids

Abstract:

Bergmann's rule states that warmer climates tend to be inhabited by smaller species than colder climates. This would imply that climate change will impact species' body size and therefore bodymass (Teplitsky & Millien, 2013). Larger carnivors are highly threatened by climate change as most of them are keystone species in their environments (Wolf & Ripple, 2016) which is why I decided to take a closer look at canids. Does Bergmann's rule apply to canids? Does that mean that certain canids are more lickely to suffer from climate change than others? It is to answer these questions that I had a look at the body mass of 30 different canid species, chosen at random from a list by Padilla & Hilton (2015), to avoid any biases. For each species chosen at random, I went into google scholar and searched for "latin species name body mass" and skimmed for any relevant results. If no relevant results showed I'd then look up the terms "latin species name body weight". Early on in my research I found the "Canids: Foxes, wolves, jackals, and dogs: Status survey and conservation action plan" by Sillero-Zubiri et al. (2004), which was used as a last resort when searching google scholar wasn't successful. The year in the column "Year of Study" is the year the data was collected in the studies where this information was available. Otherwise, I filled this column with the publication year. Coordinates were added in the appropriate columns when provided by the paper.

The above data was collected between the 1st of February 2024 and the 11th of February 2024.

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