How large should whales be?

TL;DR

This paper extends a macroevolutionary tradeoff model from terrestrial to aquatic mammals, accurately predicting cetacean sizes, including the blue whale, by considering habitat-specific heat loss and extinction risks.

Contribution

It introduces a universal macroevolutionary tradeoff model that explains body size evolution across all mammals, incorporating aquatic habitat effects without parameter tuning.

Findings

Model accurately predicts sizes of all extant cetaceans.

Habitat-specific heat loss explains the large sizes of whales.

Universal tradeoff governs mammal body size evolution.

Abstract

The evolution and distribution of species body sizes for terrestrial mammals is well-explained by a macroevolutionary tradeoff between short-term selective advantages and long-term extinction risks from increased species body size, unfolding above the 2g minimum size induced by thermoregulation in air. Here, we consider whether this same tradeoff, formalized as a constrained convection-reaction-diffusion system, can also explain the sizes of fully aquatic mammals, which have not previously been considered. By replacing the terrestrial minimum with a pelagic one, at roughly 7000g, the terrestrial mammal tradeoff model accurately predicts, with no tunable parameters, the observed body masses of all extant cetacean species, including the 175,000,000g Blue Whale. This strong agreement between theory and data suggests that a universal macroevolutionary tradeoff governs body size evolution for all mammals, regardless of their habitat. The dramatic sizes of cetaceans can thus be attributed mainly to the increased convective heat loss is water, which shifts the species size distribution upward and pushes its right tail into ranges inaccessible to terrestrial mammals. Under this macroevolutionary tradeoff, the largest expected species occurs where the rate at which smaller-bodied species move up into large-bodied niches approximately equals the rate at which extinction removes them.