Abstract

Body condition can have important fitness consequences, but measuring body condition of live animals from wild populations has been the subject of much recent debate. Using the residuals from a regression of body mass on a linear measure of body size is one of the most common methods of measuring condition and has been used in many vertebrate taxa. Recently, the use of this method has been criticized because assumptions are likely violated. We tested several assumptions regarding the use of this method with body composition and morphometric data from five species of small mammals and with statistical simulations. We tested the assumptions that the relationship between body mass and body size is linear, and that the proportion of mass associated with energy reserves is independent of body size. In addition, we tested whether the residuals from reduced major axis (RMA) regression or major axis (MA) regression performed better than the residuals from ordinary least squares (OLS) regression as indices of body condition. We found no evidence of nonlinear relationships between body mass and body size. Relative energy reserves (fat and lean dry mass) were generally independent or weakly dependent on body size. Residuals from MA and RMA regression consistently explained less variation in body composition than OLS regression. Using statistical simulations, we compared the effects of violations of the assumption that true condition and residual indices are independent of body size on the OLS, MA, and RMA procedures and found that OLS performed better than the RMA and MA procedures. Despite recent criticisms of residuals from mass–size OLS regressions, these indices of body condition appear to satisfy critical assumptions. Although some caution is warranted when using residuals, especially when both interindividual variation in body size and measurement error are high, we found no reason to reject OLS residuals as legitimate indices of body condition.