Testing metabolic theories

MR Kearney; CR White

Journal article

Testing metabolic theories

MR Kearney, CR White

American Naturalist | Published : 2012

DOI: 10.1086/667860

Abstract

Metabolism is the process by which individual organisms acquire energy and materials from their environment and use them for maintenance, differentiation, growth, and reproduction. There has been a recent push to build an individual-based metabolic underpinning into ecological theory-that is, a metabolic theory of ecology. However, the two main theories of individual metabolism that have been applied in ecology-Kooijman's dynamic energy budget (DEB) theory and theWest, Brown, and Enquist (WBE) theory- have fundamentally different assumptions. Surprisingly, the core assumptions of these two theories have not been rigorously compared from an empirical perspective. Before we can build an unders..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Michael Kearney Author

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Grants

Awarded by Australian Research Council

Funding Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Australian Research Council (projects DP110101776, DP0987626, and DP110102813), including research fellowships to M. R. K. and C. R. W. We thank D. Allen, D. Atkinson, S. Chown, C. M. Del Rio, B. Kooijman, J. Maino, M. Moses, R. Nisbet, and several anonymous reviewers for comments on the manuscript and discussion.