engleski

Martens in a changing world - body size variation over space and time

In the geographic range of a species, environmental conditions vary greatly and in order to adapt to this variation, animals change their ecology, behaviour and/or morphological traits. Based on Bergmann’s rule, animals should adapt their body size to the accelerating climate change in the last few decades. However, do changes in climate conditions over time affect the body size variation in a similar way as climatic variation over the geographical range? The goal of this study was to analyse the magnitude of variation in body mass of pine marten (Martes martes) and stone marten (Martes foina) in both space and time. We have analysed the body mass of more than 3000 pine and stone martens from Europe, collected between 1960 and 2019. We found that the body mass of pine and stone martens has changed over the geographical scale, but with contrasting patterns between the species. The variation of stone marten body mass showed a nonlinear pattern, decreasing between 1960 and 1980 and increasing from 1980 to 2019. In both species, the magnitude of body mass variation over time was larger than in the geographical scale. These differences may be related to differences in physiological adaptations to climate conditions in both species, as pine martens evolved in the boreal forest, while stone martens evolved in a sub-tropical climate, as well as to different habitats occupied by them (forest by pine martens and anthropogenic area by stone martens). These results suggest that both species will show different population responses (density variation, range shift or expansion) to climate warming.

Pine Marten, Stone Marten, body size, space, time, climate change

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