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Animal body size is driven by habitat quality, food availability, and nutrition. Adult size can relate to birth weight, to length of the ontogenetic growth period, and/or to the rate of growth. Data requirements are high for studying these growth mechanisms, but large datasets exist for some game species. In North America, large harvest datasets exist for white-tailed deer ( Odocoileus virginianus), but such data are collected under a variety of conditions and are generally dismissed for ecological research beyond local population and habitat management. We contend that such data are useful for studying the ecology of white-tailed deer growth and body size when analyzed at ordinal scale. In this paper, we test the response of growth rate to food availability by fitting a logarithmic equation that estimates growth rate only to harvest data from Fort Hood, Texas, and track changes in growth rate over time. Results of this ordinal scale model are compared to previously published models that include additional parameters, such as birth weight and adult weight. It is shown that body size responds to food availability by variation in growth rate. Models that estimate multiple parameters may not work with harvest data because they are prone to error, which renders estimates from complex models too variable to detect interannual changes in growth rate that this ordinal scale model captures. This model can be applied to harvest data, from which inferences about factors that influence animal growth and body size (e.g., habitat quality and nutritional availability) can be drawn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The body size of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) increases with latitude and thus exhibits the pattern predicted by Bergmann's rule on the basis of surface to volume ratios and heat loss. This pattern is more simply explained by the distribution of food available per individual animal, which is driven by two factors, the net primary production (NPP) of plants and deer population density. Food availability is often overlooked as a cause of an increase in body size in large terrestrial herbivores in temperate latitudes because of a fundamental misconception about the global distribution of plant productivity. Within a small latitudinal range, white-tailed deer body size as evidenced by modern deer and Holocene paleozoological remains is inversely related to population density and directly related to food availability. Food availability per animal is a product of plant productivity and population density, and is correlated with both local and regional body size variability. These local and regional food-body size patterns are consistent with recent analyses of global NPP datasets which show that ecologically relevant NPP is highest in the north temperate latitudes where white-tailed deer attain their largest body size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zooarchaeologists have long realized the analytical potential of ungulate mortality data in studies of temporally shifting foraging efficiency. An additional but seldom examined form of evidence from ungulate remains is the morphometry of age-independent body size. Together simple bivariate morphometric and mortality data from ungulate remains reveal shifts through time in harvest pressure and/or environmental carrying capacity. A proposed model of these effects is validated using wildlife biology data from white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), an ungulate taxon that is very common in North American archaeological faunas. Several archaeological implications that bear on studies of foraging efficiency in subsistence hunting economies arise from this ordinal-scale model, such as the conditions under which harvest pressure increases or decreases or when carrying capacity rises or declines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]