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Toward predicting community-level effects of climate: relative temperature scaling of metabolic and ingestion rates

ScholarsArchive at Oregon State University

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Title Toward predicting community-level effects of climate: relative temperature scaling of metabolic and ingestion rates
Names Iles, Alison C. (creator)
Date Issued 2014-09 (iso8601)
Note This is the publisher’s final pdf. The published article is copyrighted by the Ecological Society of America and can be found at: http://www.esajournals.org/loi/ecol. Supplemental Material can be found at: http://www.esapubs.org/archive/ecol/E095/231/
Abstract Predicting the effects of climate change on ecological communities requires an
understanding of how environmental factors influence both physiological processes and
species interactions. Specifically, the net impact of temperature on community structure
depends on the relative response of physiological energetic costs (metabolism) and energetic
gains (ingestion of resources) that mediate the flow of energy throughout a food web.
However, the relative temperature scaling of metabolic and ingestion rates have rarely been
measured for multiple species within an ecological assemblage and it is not known how, and to
what extent, these relative scaling differences vary among species. To investigate the relative
influence of these processes, I measured the temperature scaling of metabolic and ingestion
rates for a suite of rocky intertidal species using a multiple regression experimental design. I
compared oxygen consumption rates (as a proxy for metabolic rate) and ingestion rates by
estimating the temperature scaling parameter of the universal temperature dependence (UTD)
model, a theoretical model derived from first principles of biochemical kinetics and allometry.
The results show that consumer metabolic rates (energetic costs) tend to be more sensitive to
temperature than ingestion rates (energetic gains). Thus, as temperature increases, metabolic
rates tend to increase faster relative to ingestion rates, causing the overall energetic efficiencies
of these rocky intertidal invertebrates to decline. Metabolic and ingestion rates largely scaled
in accordance with the UTD model; however, nonlinearity was evident in several cases,
particularly at higher temperatures, in which alternative models were more appropriate. There
are few studies where multiple rate dependencies are measured on multiple species from the
same ecological community. These results indicate that there may be general patterns across
species in the temperature scaling of biological rates, with important implications for
forecasting temperature effects on ecological communities.
Genre Article
Topic body mass
Identifier Iles, A. C. (2014). Toward predicting community-level effects of climate: relative temperature scaling of metabolic and ingestion rates. Ecology, 95(9), 2657–2668. doi:10.1890/13-1342.1

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