Phylogenetic grouping, curvature and metabolic scaling in terrestrial invertebrates

作者：Roswitha B. Ehnes, Björn Christian Rall, Ulrich Brose · 发表于：Ecology Letters · 年份：2011 · DOI：10.1111/j.1461-0248.2011.01660.x · 被引用次数：239 · 研究领域：Physiological and biochemical adaptations、Insect and Arachnid Ecology and Behavior、Neurobiology and Insect Physiology Research

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 °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.