Padrões espaciais da riqueza de espécies de viperídeos na América do Sul: temperatura ambiental vs. cinética-bioquímica - doi: 10.4025/actascibiolsci.v32i2.4303

Abstract

Spatial patterns of viperid species richness in South America: environmental temperature vs. biochemical kinetics. 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 does not 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.