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| Hatchling Anolis sagrei. |
Shai Meiri of Tel Aviv University's Department of Zoology has developed a method for translating lizard body lengths to weights. Meiri's new equations calculate this valuable morphological feature to estimate the weight of a lizard species in a variety of different ecosystems.Lizards are frequently important indicator species for understanding the condition of specific ecosystems. Their body weight is a crucial index for evaluating species health, but lizards are seldom weighed, perhaps due in part to the recurring problem of spontaneous tail loss when lizards are in stress. Meir has generate equations to estimate weights from the snout–vent length.And, he used a species-level phylogenetic hypothesis to examine the ecological factors that affect the variation in weight–length relationships. Limbless and reduced limbed lizards are characterized by shallower allometric slopes, and thus long-bodied, legless species are lighter than legged lizards of comparable length. In limbed species the foraging strategy strongly influences the weights, with ambush species being bulkier at comparable lengths than active foraging species. In this study 900 species in 28 different families were used to generated a dataset of lizard weights. Full Citation: Meiri, S. 2010. Length–weight allometries in lizards. Journal of Zoology 281(3):218–226.