Heat dissipation drives the hump-shaped scaling of animal dispersal speed with body mass

Abstract

Dispersal is critical to animal survival and thus biodiversity in fragmented landscapes. Increasing fragmentation in the Anthropocene necessitates predictions about the dispersal capabilities of the many species that inhabit natural ecosystems. This requires mechanistic, trait-based models of animal dispersal which are sufficiently general as well as biologically realistic. While larger animals should generally be able to travel greater distances, reported trends in their speeds across a range of body sizes suggest limited locomotor capacities among the largest species. Here, we show that this also applies to dispersal speeds and that this arises because of their limited heat-dissipation capacities. We derive a model considering how fundamental biophysical constraints of animal body mass associated with energy utilisation (i.e. larger animals have a lower metabolic energy cost of locomotion) and heat-dissipation (i.e. larger animals require more time to dissipate metabolic heat) limit sustained (i.e. aerobic) dispersal speeds. Using an extensive empirical dataset of animal dispersal speeds (531 species), we show that this allometric heat-dissipation model best captures the hump-shaped trends in dispersal speed with body mass for flying, running and swimming animals. This implies that the inability to dissipate metabolic heat leads to the saturation and eventual decrease in dispersal speed with increasing body mass as larger animals must reduce their realised dispersal speeds in order to avoid hyperthermia during extended dispersal bouts. As a result, the highest dispersal speeds are achieved by animals of intermediate body mass, whereas the largest species might suffer from stronger dispersal limitations in fragmented landscapes than previously anticipated. Consequently, we provide a mechanistic understanding of animal dispersal speed that can be generalised across species, even when the details of an individual species biology are unknown, to facilitate more realistic predictions of biodiversity dynamics in fragmented landscapes.