Estimating Fitness: A Comparison of Body Condition Indices

摘要: Behavioral ecologists might often benefit by the ability to directly measure an animal's body condition as an estimate of foraging success, and ultimately fitness. Here we compare the reliability and effectiveness of three indices of body condition that have been heavily used in the morphometrics literature. We examined the ratio index (body mass/body size), the slope-adjusted ratio index (based on regression slopes generated from a reference population), and the residual index (the residuals of a regression of body mass on body size). We …