Divergent evolution of colony-level metabolic scaling in ants.

ABSTRACT: Metabolic scaling-the relationship between organismal metabolic rate (R) and body mass (M)-is an important property of life. In general, this relationship has been summarized by the scaling function, R = aM^b. Both the scaling elevation (a) and the scaling exponent (b) have been shown to diverge among taxa and ecological groups. However, it is unclear whether this ecological divergence observed in unitary organisms also occurs at higher levels of biological organization, such as eusocial colonies. We used the published literature to assemble the estimates of the metabolic rate of active colonies and their mass for 51 species of ants, along with three ecologically important traits with available data: trophic level (herbivorous to predaceous), foraging coordination level (solitary

SUBMITTER: Pequeno PACL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12134421 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature