DOI: 10.25338/b85g98
title: Data from: Ectothermy and the macroecology of home range scaling in snakes

description: Aim: A central question in ecology has been that of why animal
 home ranges scale more steeply with body size than do metabolic rates.
 Yet, the generality of this notion has scarcely been tested in non-model
 species like ectotherms, which have lower metabolic requirements than
 endotherms and which may therefore have different home range area
 requirements. Our aim was to examine how home range area scales with body
 size in snakes and to shed light on how other factors may shape home range
 area requirements in an understudied group of ectotherms. Location: Global
 Time Period: 1984–2018 Major Taxon Studied: Serpents Methods: We
 compiled and analyzed a dataset of snake home ranges from the literature
 to evaluate how body size, sex, climate, foraging ecology, and
 biogeographic factors shape home range area requirements.
 Results: Home range area scaled more gradually with body size in
 snakes (log-linear slope of simple linear regression 0.72 with 95%
 Confidence Interval 0.48–0.96) than has been reported for mammals and
 birds, and instead more closely following the scaling of metabolic rates
 with body size. Male snakes had larger home ranges than females and this
 difference increased as temperature increased at a study site, possibly
 from mate-searching behavior of males and greater ease reaching optimal
 body temperatures in warmer areas. Finally, home range area scaled more
 steeply for snakes that forage actively than for those that rely on
 sit-and-wait ambush foraging, a reflection of their foraging ecology. Main
 Conclusion: Our results question the general notion that animal
 home range areas scale more steeply with body size than does metabolism.
 Key distinctions in the energy demands of endotherms and ectotherms and
 their responses to those demands give rise to differing home range area
 requirements. More attention to non-model species is needed when creating
 and evaluating ecological theory.
description: <strong>Database of Snake Home Range
 Sizes</strong> Database of snake home ranges
 compiled by the authors from the literature through 2018 in CSV format.
 The database also includes body masses, home range estimates (by sex,
 where available), the number of IUCN habitats recorded for each species,
 the proportion of IUCN habitats that are aquatic, and the following
 information for each study site: location coordinates, elevation, Net
 Primary Productivity, total annual precipitation, and mean annual
 temperature. The metadata describing the values and their units as well as
 the full list of references for the database are provided in the
 README.txt file. <strong>File
 Names</strong><strong>:</strong><br>
 'todd_and_nowakowski_snake_home_range_full_dataset.csv'<br> 'README.txt' <strong>Subsets of Data and R Code for Re-creating the Analyses and Results</strong> Three subsets of the main database were created in CSV format for analysis depending on the response metric of interest as described in the associated paper. The R code provided here references the three CSV files as named and will recreate the results reported in the associated manuscript published at <em>Global Ecology and Biogeography</em>. <strong>File Names</strong><strong>:</strong><br> 'Snake_HR_Ratios.csv'<br> 'Snake_HR_woSex.csv'<br> 'Snake_HR_wSex.csv'<br> 'SnakeHR_LMM_PLMM.R'