Do insect metabolic rates at rest and during flight scale with body mass?

ABSTRACT: Energetically costly behaviours, such as flight, push physiological systems to their limits requiring metabolic rates (MR) that are highly elevated above the resting MR (RMR). Both RMR and MR during exercise (e.g. flight or running) in birds and mammals scale allometrically, although there is little consensus about the underlying mechanisms or the scaling relationships themselves. Even less is known about the allometric scaling of RMR and MR during exercise in insects. We analysed data on the resting and flight MR (FMR) of over 50 insect species that fly to determine whether RMR and FMR scale allometrically. RMR scaled with body mass to the power of 0.66 (M0.66), whereas FMR scaled with M1.10. Further analysis suggested that FMR scaled with two separate relationships; insects weighing less

SUBMITTER: Niven JE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1617160 | biostudies-literature | 2005 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature