Simulation of Rapoport's rule for latitudinal species spread

Rapoport's rule claims that latitudinal ranges of plant and animal species are generally smaller at low than at high latitudes. However, doubts as to the generality of the rule have been expressed, because studies providing evidence against the rule are more numerous than those in support of it. In groups for which support has been provided, the trend of increasing latitudinal ranges with latitude is restricted to or at least most distinct at high latitudes, suggesting that the effect may be a local phenomenon, for example the result of glaciations. Here we test the rule using two models, a simple one-dimensional one with a fixed number of animals expanding in a northern or southerly direction only, and the evolutionary/ecological Chowdhury model using birth, ageing, death, mutation, speciation, prey-predator relations and food levels. Simulations with both models gave results contradicting Rapoport's rule. In the first, latitudinal ranges were roughly independent of latitude, in the second, latitudinal ranges were greatest at low latitudes, as also shown empirically for some well-studied groups of animals.

• Publication year

  2005

• Venue

  Theory in biosciences

• Publication date

  2005-07-21

• Fields of study

  Biology, Computer Science, Geography, Environmental Science, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.thbio.2006.01.002arXiv q-bio/0507033PMID 17046373
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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