A kinetic description of the body size distributions of species

TL;DR

This paper develops a kinetic model using statistical mechanics to accurately reproduce and analyze the body size distribution of various species, validated through mammalian data fitting.

Contribution

It introduces a novel kinetic approach to model species body size distributions, providing explicit equilibrium solutions and demonstrating effectiveness with empirical data.

Findings

Successfully reproduces body size distributions of diverse species

Provides explicit equilibrium distribution formulas

Validated with mammalian Chiroptera population data

Abstract

In this paper, by resorting to classical methods of statistical mechanics, we build a kinetic model able to reproduce the observed statistical weight distribution of many diverse species. The kinetic description of the time variations of the weight distribution is based on elementary interactions that describe in a qualitative and quantitative way successive evolutionary updates, and determine explicit equilibrium distributions. Numerical fittings on mammalian eutherians of the order Chiroptera population illustrates the effectiveness of the approach.