Abstract:
Speed is the fundamental constraint on animal movement, yet there is no general consensus on the determinants of maximum speed itself. Here, we provide a general scaling model of maximum speed with body mass, which holds across locomotion modes, ecosystem types and taxonomic groups. In contrast to traditional power-law scaling, we predict a hump-shaped relationship resulting from a finite acceleration time for animals, which explains why the largest animals are not the fastest. This model is strongly supported by extensive empirical data (474 species, with body masses ranging from 30??g to 100?tonnes) from terrestrial as well as aquatic ecosystems. Our approach unravels a fundamental constraint on the upper limit of animal movement, thus enabling a better understanding of realized movement patterns in nature and their multifold ecological consequences.
Movement is one of the most fundamental processes of life. The individual survival of mobile organisms depends on their ability to reach resources and mating partners, escape predators, and switch between habitat patches or breeding and wintering grounds. By creating and sustaining individual home ranges1 and meta-communities2, movement also profoundly affects the ability of animals to cope with changes in land use and in climate3. Additionally, movement determines encounter rates and thus the strength of species interactions4, which is an important factor influencing ecosystem stability5. Accordingly, a generalized and predictive understanding of animal movement is crucial6,7.
A fundamental constraint on movement is maximum speed. The realized movement depends on ecological factors such as landscape structure, habitat quality or sociality, but the range within which this realized movement occurs meets its upper limit at maximum movement speed. Similar to many physiological and ecological parameters, movement speed of animals is often thought to follow a power-law relationship with body mass8,9,10. However, scientists have always struggled with the fact that, in running animals, the largest are not the fastest11,12,13,14. In nature, the fastest running or swimming animals such as cheetahs or marlins are of intermediate size, indicating that a hump-shaped pattern may be more realistic. There have been numerous attempts to describe this phenomenon11,12,13,15,16. Although biomechanical and morphological models have been tailored to explain this within taxonomic groups14,16,17,18, a general mechanistic model predicting the large-scale pattern (over the full body-mass range) across all taxonomic groups and ecosystem types is still lacking. Here, we fill this void with a maximum-speed model based on the concept that animals are limited in their time for maximum acceleration because of restrictions on the quickly available energy. Consequently, acceleration time becomes the critical factor determining the maximum speed of animals. In the following, we first develop the maximum-speed model (in equations that are illustrated in the conceptual Fig. 1), test the model predictions employing a global database and eventually illustrate its applications to advance a more general understanding of animal movement.