![]() ![]() ![]() Biologist Pablo Teta of the Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales “Bernardino Rivadavia” in Buenos Aires, Argentina, began studying the mice as part of his doctoral thesis. The species of mouse that features in the current research is the shaggy soft-haired mouse, Abrothrix hirta. There are numerous such biological rules, all of them helping biologists to identify and understand patterns that they observe in nature. And biologists who study patterns in animal morphology will be familiar with Allen’s rule stating that the body shapes and proportions of endotherms will be different in warm and cold climates in order to maximize or minimize heat loss respectively. Scientists studying a species of small mouse from the Andes Mountains in Patagonia think they may have come up with a new biological rule that explains the variation in size within populations of these mice.Įcologists are familiar with Gause’s law, for example, which states that two species competing for the same resource cannot coexist successfully together – one species will lose the competition. Over the centuries, naturalists have proposed numerous biological “rules” or “laws” to explain apparent patterns that are observed in nature, and then researchers have collected data that either supports or disproves the generalizability of these rules. The natural world is full of complex phenomena that are not easily understood at first glance. ![]()
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