Why does metabolic rate scale with body size?

Geoffrey B. West (), Savage Van M., James Gillooly, Brian J. Enquist, William H. Woodruff and James H. Brown
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Geoffrey B. West: Los Alamos National Laboratory
Savage Van M.: Los Alamos National Laboratory
James Gillooly: University of New Mexico
Brian J. Enquist: University of Arizona
William H. Woodruff: Los Alamos National Laboratory
James H. Brown: The Santa Fe Institute

Nature, 2003, vol. 421, issue 6924, 713-713

Abstract: Abstract A long-standing problem has been the origin of quarter-power allometric scaling laws that relate many characteristics of organisms to their body mass1,2 — specifically, whole-organism metabolic rate, B = aMb, where M is body mass, a is a taxon-dependent normalization, and b ≈ 3/4 for animals and plants. Darveau et al.3 propose a multiple-cause model for mammalian metabolic rate as the “sum of multiple contributors”, Bi, which they assume to scale as Bi = a i MML:M b i , and obtain b ≈ 0.78 for the basal and 0.86 for the maximally active rate, $${\mathop V\limits^{\bullet}}{}_{{\rm O}_2}^{\max}$$ . We argue, however, that this scaling equation is based on technical, theoretical and conceptual errors, including misrepresentations of our published results4,5.

Date: 2003
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DOI: 10.1038/421713a

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