Biased assessment of thermal properties of birds from estimated body density

Parameter approximation is often necessary when calculating species thermal properties, and researchers historically have assumed animals are spherical when estimating volume and density. We hypothesized that a spherical model would result in significantly biased measures of density for birds, which are generally longer than they are tall or wide, and that these inaccuracies would significantly alter the outputs of thermal models. We calculated the densities of 154 bird species using sphere and ellipsoid volume equations and compared these estimates to one another and to published bird densities measured using more exact volume displacement methods. We also calculated evaporative water loss as a percentage of body mass per hour, a variable known to be critical for bird survival, twice for each species, once with the sphere-based density and once with the ellipsoid-based density. We found that volume and density estimates were statistically similar between published densities and those estimated using the ellipsoid volume equation, suggesting that this method is suitable for approximating bird volume and calculating density. In contrast, the spherical model overestimated body volume and therefore underestimated body densities. This resulted in the spherical approach consistently overestimating evaporative water loss as a percent of mass lost per hour than the ellipsoid approach. This outcome would result in mischaracterizing thermal conditions as lethal for a given species, including overestimating vulnerability to increased temperatures due to climate change.