Phylogenetic grouping, curvature and metabolic scaling in terrestrial invertebrates

Abstract

For more than a century, the scaling of animal metabolic rates with individual body masses and environmental temperature has predominantly been described by power-law and exponential relationships respectively. Many theories have been proposed to explain these scaling relationships, but were challenged by empirically documented curvatures on double-logarithmic scales. In the present study, we present a novel data set comprising 3661 terrestrial (mainly soil) invertebrate respiration rates from 192 independent sources across a wide range in body masses, environmental temperatures and phylogenetic groups. Although our analyses documented power-law and exponential scaling with body masses and temperature, respectively, polynomial models identified curved deviations. Interestingly, complex scaling models accounting for phylogenetic groups were able to remove curvatures except for a negative curvature at the highest temperatures (>30 degrees C) indicating metabolic down regulation. This might indicate that the tremendous differences in invertebrate body architectures, ecology and physiology may cause severely different metabolic scaling processes.

Keywords

Body mass; curvature; invertebrate; metabolic rate; MTE; phylogenetic group; polynomial; respiration; temperature

Published in

Ecology Letters
2011, volume: 14, number: 10, pages: 993-1000-1000

SLU Authors

• Ehnes, Roswitha

  • University of Göttingen

UKÄ Subject classification

Ecology
Zoology

Publication identifier

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1461-0248.2011.01660.x

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/84566