Island Rule Paper

Ok, I am admittedly way behind on this, as the paper I'm now blogging about came out over a week ago but given that we've posted about the Island Rule in here before, I'd feel remiss if we didn't cover a paper arguing that this well known rule from biogeography is a statistical artifact. If you are wondering why human ecologists should care about the Island Rule, that is also addressed in the previous post. So, this paper was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society:

title: The island rule: made to be broken?

authors: Shai Meiri, Natalie Cooper, and Andy Purvis

abstract: The island rule is a hypothesis whereby small mammals evolve larger size on islands while large insular mammals dwarf. The rule is believed to emanate from small mammals growing larger to control more resources and enhance metabolic efficiency, while large mammals evolve smaller size to reduce resource requirements and increase reproductive output. We show that there is no evidence for the existence of the island rule when phylogenetic comparative methods are applied to a large, high-quality dataset. Rather, there are just a few clade-specific patterns: carnivores; heteromyid rodents; and artiodactyls typically evolve smaller size on islands whereas murid rodents usually grow larger. The island rule is probably an artefact of comparing distantly related groups showing clade-specific responses to insularity. Instead of a
rule, size evolution on islands is likely to be governed by the biotic and abiotic characteristics of different islands, the biology of the species in question and contingency.


So the issue in this and lots of studies that look at body size related trends is whether or not species can be treated as independent data points or whether adjustments have to be made for the phylogenetic relatedness of the species. That is, a bunch of species could exhibit a similar trend in something simply because they are closely related and if this is not adjusted for then we run the risk of identifying trends that we think are related to body size but are really just due to genetics/ancestry. Let's pretend that there are 3 camps on this issue - those that think you always have to adjust for phylogeny, those that think you have to sometimes, and those that think you never do. The authors of this paper would be in the first group, I would be in the second. Issues of statistical independence may indeed be under-appreicated in cross-species analysis of the sort common in biogeography and in studies of allometry. But as Jim Brown has pointed out (in informal lab-meeting type settings) it is not always clear exactly what things need to be controlled for in any given analysis. So, sure, for some things phylogeny might be the most important but in others it could be something like biome or some attribute of the niche that is occupied - or some general feature of ecology. There could potentially be a lot of uncontrolled confounds out there... How do we know which ones are most important, especially when we rarely have data on all of the potential variables we might want to examine?

So, this paper specifically argues that the trends that we think are behind the Island Rule are due to lineage specific responses to island colonization. That due to some issue of shared ancestry different but related species consistently respond similarly to island environments with respect to body mass change simply because they are related and not because of any general relationship between the mass of a colonizing organism and the island environment. The authors point out that none of the papers that have previously looked at the Island Rule have considered the role of phylogeny. After using methods that control for phylogeny, they state that:
"We did not find convincing evidence that larger size leads to insular size reduction within mammals in general (using independent contrasts) or within clades. Neither do we find that, as a rule, large mammals dwarf on islands nor that small mammals grow large..."

I'll also include a quote from their methods:
"We used only those studies that reported body size of mainland populations geographically closest to the island in question (Lawlor 1982). Some insular populations have their nearest
sister taxon on a mainland areawhich is a considerable distance away (e.g. Hafner et al. 2001). The paucity of good intraspecific phylogenetic data, however, precludes us from identifying the
closest relatives for most insular populations and we therefore use geographical distance to approximate phylogenetic affinity."

The issue of when we can and when we can't use species as data points won't be fully resolved any time soon. I'm sure that this paper will lead to some careful attention to this issue in the biogeographic community.

Cheers,
O