Sammanfattning

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.

Nyckelord

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

Publicerad i

Ecology Letters
2011, Volym: 14, nummer: 10, sidor: 993-1000-1000

UKÄ forskningsämne

Ekologi
Zoologi


Publikationens identifierare

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

Permanent länk till denna sida (URI)

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