We are gathering information about the effect of exploitation/hunting (commercial or for sport) of vertebrates on their size. We have information for fishes and mammals but none for reptiles.
These publications can be useful for you :
The Global Decline of Reptiles. JW Gibbons, DE Scott, TJ Ryan… - …, 2000 - bioscience.oxfordjournals.org
Exploitation competition and the evolution of interference, cannibalism, and intraguild predation in age/size-structured populations
GA Polis - Size-structured populations, 1988 - Springer
Evolution of herbivory in lacertid lizards: effects of insularity and body size
R Van Damme - Journal of Herpetology, 1999 - JSTOR
Effects of supportive breeding on the genetically effective population size
N Ryman, L Laikre - Conservation Biology, 1991 - Wiley Online Library
Very interesting Pierre. The term size here might be ambiguous, so it might be worth clarifying to get more answers. Some researchers like myself might think you are interested in the change in mean body size after harvesting, but others might think that you are interested in changes on population size (abundance) after harvest.
There is a paper by Kevin Wallace and Tim Coulson and others in the Journal of Animal Ecology on Crocodiles in which they used IPMs to explore the contribution of different size classes to different demographic parameters that influence population size. This might be useful.
I guess that the challenge in such a study is to have reliable information on what size classes and sexes the hunters (or harvest regime) were targeting in the first place, as this can have huge implications for both, body size distributions and population size in the next generations. If body size has high heritability the implications of removal in the trait are obvious. And, if different size classes are targeted, the effects on reproduction and survival (and hence abundance) will also vary (as body size is associated with fitness). Best luck
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