Are day-active small mammals rare and small birds abundant in Australia desert environments because small mammals are inferior thermoregulators?
Access Status
Authors
Date
2004Type
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Additional URLs
Faculty
Remarks
Email: c.cooper@curtin.edu.au
Copyright © 2011 CSIRO
Collection
Abstract
Small desert birds are typically diurnal and highly mobile (hence conspicuous) whereas small non-volant mammals are generally nocturnal and less mobile (hence inconspicuous). Birds are more mobile than terrestrial mammals on a local and geographic scale, and most desert birds are not endemic but simply move to avoid the extremes of desert conditions. Many small desert mammals are relatively sedentary and regularly use physiological adjustments to cope with their desert environment (e.g., aestivation or hibernation). It seems likely that prey activity patterns and reduced conspicuousness to predators have reinforced nocturnality in small desert mammals. Differences such as nocturnality and mobility simply reflect differing life-history traits of birds and mammals rather than being a direct result of their differences in physiological capacity for tolerating daytime desert conditions.
Related items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
Cooper, Christine (2015)Many Australian tetrapods inhabit desert environments characterised by low productivity, unpredictable rainfall, high temperatures and high incident solar radiation. Maintaining a homeostatic milieu intérieur by osmoregulation ...
-
Eto, E.; Withers, Philip; Cooper, Christine (2017)Birds have many physiological characteristics that are convergent with mammals. In the light of recent evidence that mammals can maintain a constant insensible evaporative water loss (EWL) over a range of perturbing ...
-
Withers, P.; Cooper, Christine (2014)It is a central paradigm of comparative physiology that the effect of humidity on evaporative water loss (EWL) is determined for most mammals and birds, in and below thermoneutrality, essentially by physics and is not ...