Why Do Badgers Around the World Look Different: The Correlation between Badgers’ Aurface Area to Volume Ratio and Environment

Abstract

According to Dr. French’s lab manual (2014), different species of badgers living in different regions display varying sizes and volumes. Badgers reside all across the globe in continents ranging from North America, to Africa and Asia (French, 2014). This range of habitats includes many different climates, as well as many different shapes and sizes of badgers. During this experiment, we sought to understand why some species of badgers are shaped differently than others. Our hypothesis is that this variation in size is due to the variation in climates in which different species of badgers reside. We believe badgers in cooler climates are larger because this means they have a smaller surface area to volume ratio, which helps them retain heat. We used an experiment measuring the rate of temperature change of varying sizes of clay models corresponding to the species of badgers to interpret what would happen in their natural habitats and how this varying body size may help them thermoregulate.