. Biology of the Heteromyidae. Heteromyidae. Fig. 3.—Perognathus inornatus, a small, silky, quadrupedally-saltatorial perognathine. (Photo: J. F. Eisenberg) interactions with predators (, Kotler, 1984, 1985) and with plants (Reichman and Rebar, 1985; Reichman et al., 1986), make this assemblage of desert rodents an enticing experimental system—one likely to yield re- sults of broad application to evolutionary ecology. The desert areas of North America have the advantage of more than a century of research effort by thousands of biologists. The result of this labor is a growing appre- ciatio
. Biology of the Heteromyidae. Heteromyidae. Fig. 3.—Perognathus inornatus, a small, silky, quadrupedally-saltatorial perognathine. (Photo: J. F. Eisenberg) interactions with predators (, Kotler, 1984, 1985) and with plants (Reichman and Rebar, 1985; Reichman et al., 1986), make this assemblage of desert rodents an enticing experimental system—one likely to yield re- sults of broad application to evolutionary ecology. The desert areas of North America have the advantage of more than a century of research effort by thousands of biologists. The result of this labor is a growing appre- ciation of how complex the biotic interac- tions are that permit organisms to inhabit hot, arid regions that are subject to exten- sive droughts. Heteromyid rodents are found in all North American xeric areas, regard- less of the climate and substrate; given a few requisite plant products (, seeds) and fri- able soil for burrow placement, one or more heteromyid species will be present. Clearly, the heteromyid adaptive strategy is quite effective in allowing colonization of the North American deserts. Precisely because these rodents are so successful at inhabiting areas where few oth- er small mammals can survive, it might be expected that the suite of desert adaptations shown by members of the family Hetero- myidae would be likely to appear in mam- mals living in other deserts of the world. Should there prove to be only a limited number of ways for a small mammal to exist in the rigorous desert environment ( Mares, 1975a, 1976; and see Hafner, this volume), and should the adaptive suite of the heteromyids reflect some of the more successful characteristics for desert exis- tence, then evolution in other deserts might have led to the development of species that were strongly convergent on the heteromyid type. Repeated examples of such convergent evolution would suggest that deserts, being cUmatically challenging habitats for small homeothermic mammals, exact similar ad- a
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