conclusion The Way Forward

A number of common themes run throughout this volume. First, one begins to appreciate just how much variation there is in body size among most groups of animals. For the most part, a clade is not a ho-mogenous collection of similar bauplans. Even among volant taxa, such as birds and bats, substantial variation in body mass exists despite the considerable constraints imposed by fl ight (chaps. 3, 4, 8). Moreover, body size variation is clearly important in terms of community and eco-system dynamics and structure (e.g., chaps. 6–9); how animals interact with their environment is strongly mediated by their body mass. Thus, the size of an organism is of great physiological and ecological signifi-cance (Peters 1983). Second, there are remarkably consistent patterns in the body size dis-tributions of some taxa across spatial and temporal gradients that may well refl ect how organisms acquire and allocate energy. For example, right-skewed body size distributions seem to be quite common among diverse clades (chaps. 1–5). However, these regular patterns vary be