Allometric correlates of heat tolerance in birds: A test using quail breeds with extreme size variation

Birds and mammals are shrinking and shapeshifting as global temperatures rise. Ecogeographic rules predict that such changes should ease heat stress by increasing surface-area-to-volume ratios, and thus, the capacity for heat exchange. This has led to the hypothesis that body size reductions are driven by thermoregulatory selection or adaptive plasticity, although recent syntheses point to more complex, multifactorial causes. Crucially, recent theoretical models predict that thermoregulatory benefits of smaller body size only emerge at extreme deviations from average phenotypes. Here, we exploit agricultural selection in Japanese quail to directly test this hypothesis, using three breeds spanning extreme differences in body mass, surface area, and relative appendage lengths. Evaporative cooling capacity and the scope for evaporative water loss broadly followed allometric predictions when contrasting small and larger breeds. As expected, this allowed the smallest breed to tolerate higher air temperatures. However, differences in heat tolerance limits between breeds were consistently much smaller than predicted. Additionally, the breadth of thermoneutral zones overlapped in full, and upper critical temperatures were remarkably similar, between breeds. Together, these results show that heat tolerance is only weakly linked to surface-area-to-volume relationships and cannot be explained by size alone. Thus, although smaller bodies may modestly enhance heat dissipation when size variation in a population is substantial, our findings suggest that recent body size reductions and morphological shifts are unlikely to be driven primarily by thermoregulatory benefits.