When it comes to invertebrate body size, it’s hard to go big toward the poles

Ecologists have long been fascinated with body size as the “one functional trait that rules them all”. An organism’s body size is just so good at helping us understand how it fits into the rest of the community. Thus an exhaustive dataset on how communities of organisms (e.g., all the birds that occupy a woodlot, all the spiders collected from a single tropical tree) vary as you move from place to place—we’re talking real Geographic Ecology here—has always been a grail for ecologists.