Energy use and animal abundance in litter and soil communities

Tools from metabolic scaling and food web theory were used to construct a general model of carbon flux by litter and soil invertebrates. The flux model was used to explore the energetic basis of invertebrate abundance and predicted that abundance should (1) scale linearly with net primary production...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Ecology (Durham) 2006-07, Vol.87 (7), p.1650-1658
Main Author: Meehan, Timothy D.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
abundance
ambient temperature
Animal and plant ecology
Animal physiology
Animal, plant and microbial ecology
Animals
arthropods
Biological and medical sciences
body mass
Body size
Body temperature
body weight
carbon
Energy Metabolism
Food Chain
Food chains
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
General aspects. Techniques
International Biological Programme
Invertebrates
Invertebrates - physiology
Marine ecology
mathematical models
metabolic scaling theory
Methods and techniques (sampling, tagging, trapping, modelling...)
Modeling
Models, Biological
Net primary production
plant litter
Population Dynamics
Population ecology
population size
prediction
primary productivity
Soil
soil arthropods
Soil ecology
Soil invertebrates
Synecology
Temperature
Terrestrial ecosystems
Theory
Trees - physiology
trophic level
Trophic levels
trophic relationships
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:Tools from metabolic scaling and food web theory were used to construct a general model of carbon flux by litter and soil invertebrates. The flux model was used to explore the energetic basis of invertebrate abundance and predicted that abundance should (1) scale linearly with net primary production; (2) be related to the body mass of animals as a power function, with an exponent between -0.65 and -0.85; (3) be related to the average body temperature of animals according to the Boltzmann factor, with an activation energy between 0.27 and 0.79 eV; and (4) decrease by a factor of 0.05 to 0.15 across trophic levels due to gross production efficiency of prey. Model predictions were generally supported by a global data set on invertebrate abundance that was amassed during the International Biological Programme, indicating that fundamental energetic principles explain a large degree of variation in invertebrate abundance across the globe.
ISSN:0012-9658
1939-9170
DOI:10.1890/0012-9658(2006)87[1650:euaaai]2.0.co;2