Question

Metabolic rate: measurements of, importance of mass, relationships with allometry, cost of locomotion

Answer 1

Metabolic rate: Measurements

Metabolic rate. The amount of energy expended by an animal over a specific period of time is called its metabolic rate. Metabolic rate may be measured in joules, calories, or kilocalories per unit time. You may also see metabolic rate given as oxygen consumed (or carbon dioxide produced) per unit time.

Importance of mass :

Metabolic mass, which is a measure of whole-body energy needs (kcal/day).

Per-mass metabolic rates help us make meaningful comparisons between organisms of different sizes.

Allometry is the study of how these processes scale with body size and with each other, and the impact this has on ecology and evolution. ... The term originally referred to the scaling relationship between the size of a body part and the size of the body as a whole, as both grow during development.

Allometry is how an organism's features change relative to the size of its other features. In its narrowest sense, allometry refers to the different rates at which different organs grow. For instance, a male fiddler crab's display claw grows much faster than the rest of its body. ... This is called evolutionary allometry.

Cost of locomotion-

The minimum cost of transport (the minimum ratio of metabolic rate to the product of speed and body weight) for various walking, running and flying animals is functionally related to the type of transport and to body weight.

1.The same functional relations hold for poikilotherms and homeotherms, and for five or more decades of body weight.

2. The cost of transport for a flying animal is less than that for a walker or a runner of the same size. The two costs differ by a factor of 27 for animals weighing 0·01 kg.

3. Large birds and mammals have costs of transport that are about the same as those for automobiles and small propeller airplanes