title: 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 °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.
authors.affiliation: J.F. Blumenbach Institute of Zoology and Anthropology, Berliner Str. 28, 37073 Göttingen, Germany. ehnes@bio.tu-darmstadt.de
authors.forename: Roswitha B
authors.initials: RB
authors.lastname: Ehnes
authors.forename: Björn C
authors.initials: BC
authors.lastname: Rall
authors.forename: Ulrich
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Brose
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D004734:Energy Metabolism / Q000502:physiology*; D007448:Invertebrates / Q000145:classification* / Q000378:metabolism*; D008954:Models, Biological; D010802:Phylogeny; D013696:Temperature