Ecology. Invariants, scaling laws, and ecological complexity.
There has been much debate about scaling laws in nature. It is believed that as body size increases the number of individuals in the population decreases. As Marquet explains in his Perspective, an elegant new study in two totally separate stream communities (Schmid et al.) confirms that this scaling law holds across more than 400 species of invertebrates.
Marquet
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Departamento de Ecología, P. Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile. pmarquet@genes.bio.puc.cl
D000818:Animals; D001317:Austria; D001824:Body Constitution; D017753:Ecosystem; D007448:Invertebrates / Q000033:anatomy & histology* / Q000502:physiology*; D008433:Mathematics; D011156:Population Density; D012044:Regression Analysis; D014852:Wales