Rethinking the metabolic allometry of ants

I re-examined the scaling of metabolic rate versus body mass in eight species of ant (static allometry) to illustrate one of the ways by which contemporary concepts of metabolic allometry have been negatively impacted by the widespread use of a standardized procedure for analyzing bivariate data. Th...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Evolutionary ecology 2020-04, Vol.34 (2), p.149-161
Main Author: Packard, Gary C.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Allometry
Analysis
Animal Ecology
Ants
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Bivariate analysis
Body mass
Body size
Ecology
Evolutionary Biology
Life Sciences
Mathematical models
Metabolic rate
Metabolism
New Tests of Existing Ideas
Optimization
Plant Sciences
Statistical analysis
Statistical models
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:I re-examined the scaling of metabolic rate versus body mass in eight species of ant (static allometry) to illustrate one of the ways by which contemporary concepts of metabolic allometry have been negatively impacted by the widespread use of a standardized procedure for analyzing bivariate data. The procedure in question is the one promoted by Julian Huxley in his monograph on Problems of Relative Growth , and entails back-transforming the equation for a straight line fitted to logarithmic transformations of the original observations to form a two-parameter power function on the arithmetic scale. The scaling exponents for power equations fitted to data by Huxley’s protocol were used by the original authors to evaluate predictions from a theoretical model for the evolutionary optimization of body size in animals. However, my analyses—which were based on a different philosophy and protocol for modeling bivariate data—show that observations for each of the species can be described equally well by two or more different equations with different functional form. Metabolic rate is generally higher in large individuals than in small ones, but little more can be said about metabolic allometry in ants because a clear distinction cannot be made between alternative statistical models that require very different interpretations for biological importance. Conclusions from any investigation that relies exclusively on Huxley’s analytical protocol will be based on incomplete and potentially misleading evidence.
ISSN:0269-7653
1573-8477
DOI:10.1007/s10682-020-10033-5