Acta Scientiarum: Biological Sciences (Apr 2010)
Padrões espaciais da riqueza de espécies de viperídeos na América do Sul: temperatura ambiental vs. cinética-bioquímica = Spatial patterns of viperid species richness in South America: environmental temperature vs. biochemical kinetics.
Abstract
Este estudo tem por objetivo testar a influência da temperatura na taxa metabólica de viperídeos como um mecanismo básico de origem dos padrões espaciais de riqueza desse grupo na América do Sul, como proposto por Allen et al. (2002) dentro da Teoria Metabólica em Ecologia. Para isso, testamos a relação entre o logaritmo natural dariqueza de espécies de viperídeos e o inverso da temperatura (em Kelvin, 1000*K-1), após corrigir os efeitos da autocorrelação espacial, e verificamos se a reta estimada apresenta inclinação de -9,0*T. As variáveis apresentaram baixo índice de correlação (r2 = 0,216; p The aim of this study was to test the influence of temperature on metabolic rates of viperid species as the underlying mechanism to explain the richness pattern of this group in South America, following the Metabolic Theory of Ecology (MTE) proposed by Allen et al. (2002). We tested MTE predictions by considering the relationship between the natural logarithm of viperid species richness and the inverse of temperature (in Kelvin, 1000*K-1) after to correct for spatial autocorrelation effects and to check whether the linear function presents a slope of -9.0*T. The relationship between variables presented low correlation coefficient (r2 = 0.216; P < 0.0001) and a slope of -3.737*T (C.I. (95%) ± 0.379).These results showed that viperids respond in a different way to the temperature gradient in comparison with other taxa and the prediction of Allen et al. (2002), since the confidence interval of slope in this case doesnot include the value of -9.0*T. This study demonstrates that temperature is not the sole driver of broad-scale spatial pattern of viperid species richness in South America.
