Fig 1.
Examples of digestive tracts of faunivorous and herbivorous mammals as compared to reptiles.
Modified from Stevens and Hume [9]. Note the seemingly less distinct differentiation in intestinal length across trophic groups in reptiles.
Fig 2.
Magnitude comparison of the length of the small intestine, the large intestine and the caecum in reptiles.
Note that the slope of the scaling of the three sections in log-log-space appears similar.
Table 1.
Summary statistics for allometric scaling of insteinal length with body mass in reptiles, as log(y) = a + b log(body mass), or y = (10a) BMb (significant parameters in bold).
Fig 3.
Relationship of body mass, intestinal length and trophic level in reptiles for (A) total intestine (n = 157 species), (B) small intestine (n = 147), (C) large intestine (Caecum and colon) (n = 141), (D) caecum (n = 52), as compared to mammals (light grey symbols). For statistics, see S3-S5 Tables in S1 File. Mammal data from [3].
Fig 4.
Relationship of snout-vent-length (SVL) and intestinal length in reptiles for (A) the total intestine, (B) the small intestine, (C) the large intestine, (D) caecum, for taxonomic groups. Note that snakes are all faunivorous and have, at a similar intestine length, a similar body mass as other reptiles, but a longer body length. For statistics, see S8 Table in S1 File. The dotted line represents y = x to facilitate gauging the slope of the length-length relationships.