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CHAPTER TEN

By wind, wings or water: body size,

dispersal and range size in aquatic

invertebrates

SIMON D.RUNDLE

University of Plymouth

DAVID T.BILTON

University of Plymouth

ANDREW FOGGO

University of Plymouth

Introduction
The past 15 years have seen a dramatic increase in the study of large-scale
patterns and processes in ecology under the banner of macroecology (Brown &
Maurer,1989 ). Organismal body size is one of the key components of many of
these studies, and the distribution of body size and its relationship with range
size and abundance figure extensively in the macroecological literature (Gaston &
Blackburn,2000 ; Blackburn & Gaston,2003 ; Gaston,2003 ). Body size is also the
central component of the ‘three-quarters scaling law’, which predicts that metab-
olism scales to body mass0.75(e.g. Gilloolyet al., 2001 ) and is seeing increasing
use in ecological predictions, including those concerning trophic interactions
(Woodwardet al., 2005 ), population dynamics (Marquetet al., 2005 ), species
diversity (Allen, Brown & Gillooly,2002 ) and energy flow (Enquistet al., 2003 );
indeed, the scaling of metabolism with body mass has also recently been used in
attempts to make macroecological predictions (e.g. Jetzet al., 2004 ).
Despite the recent surge of interest in large-scale ecological patterns, aquatic
ecologists have been slow to take up the concept of macroecology. It could
perhaps be argued that much of the aquatic ‘community ecology’ over the
past couple of decades, relating assemblage composition in aquatic systems to
environmental variables, was macroecology of sorts. However, this research has
rarely progressed to examine over-arching patterns and their potential under-
lying mechanisms, and is therefore somewhat limited in how it can inform
general ecological theory. Hence, with the exception of some work on fishes
(Taylor & Gotelli,1994; Pyron, 1999 ; Rosenfield, 2002 ; Goodwin, Dulvy &
Reynolds, 2005 ) and on eukaryotic microbes (see Finlay, 2002 and Finlay &
Esteban, this volume), there is a dearth of research on the macroecological

Body Size: The Structure and Function of Aquatic Ecosystems, eds. Alan G. Hildrew, David G. Raffaelli and Ronni
Edmonds-Brown. Published by Cambridge University Press.#British Ecological Society 2007.