Bird Age
Full analysis is here
I stumbled across a dataset of bird ages on a USGS website, and wanted to know if there was a relationship between bird age and other variables (weight, wingspan, etc).
Link Between Bird Age and Phylogenetic Order?
I wanted to know if there was any signal for how old birds get if theyre closely related. Ultimately, I would love to know how age is affected by size (weight, wingspan, whatever) but I cant find open datasets for that.
Looks like some bird orders have individuals that live longer than others, but it’s difficult to say for some whether thats just a sampling issue.
Mean Variance Relationship
The relationship between the mean and the variance of a dataset can tell you … stuff (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variance_function). Honestly I was just curious if there was a relationship, I need to revisit why this bit is important.
It looks like there is a pretty strong relationship between log mean and log variance, with an R2 of 0.3722, a slope of 0.14848.
Next Up?
Ideally, it would be awesome to find a dataset that tied bird name with bird weight or wingspan or other variables. That way you could see if bird weight/wingspan correlated with age or phylogeny. It would also be cool to see a tree of bird orders to see if more closely related things had similar ages.