Related Research Articles
A biennial plant is a flowering plant that takes two years to complete its biological life cycle. In the first year, the plant undergoes primary growth, in which its leaves, stems, and roots develop. Usually, the stem of the plant remains short and the leaves are low to the ground, forming a rosette. After the first year, the plant enters a period of dormancy for the colder months. Many biennials require a cold treatment, or vernalization, before they will flower. During the next spring or summer, the stem of the biennial plant elongates greatly, or "bolts". The plant then flowers, producing fruits and seeds before it finally dies. There are far fewer biennials than either perennial plants or annual plants.
Homeothermy, homothermy or homoiothermy is thermoregulation that maintains a stable internal body temperature regardless of external influence. This internal body temperature is often, though not necessarily, higher than the immediate environment. Homeothermy is one of the three types of thermoregulation in warm-blooded animal species. Homeothermy's opposite is poikilothermy.
An endotherm is an organism that maintains its body at a metabolically favorable temperature, largely by the use of heat set free by its internal bodily functions instead of relying almost purely on ambient heat. Such internally generated heat is mainly an incidental product of the animal's routine metabolism, but under conditions of excessive cold or low activity an endotherm might apply special mechanisms adapted specifically to heat production. Examples include special-function muscular exertion such as shivering, and uncoupled oxidative metabolism such as within brown adipose tissue. Only birds and mammals are extant universally endothermic groups of animals. Certain lamnid sharks, tuna and billfishes are also endothermic.
In ecology, the competitive exclusion principle, sometimes referred to as Gause's law, is a proposition named for Georgy Gause that two species competing for the same limited resource cannot coexist at constant population values. When one species has even the slightest advantage over another, the one with the advantage will dominate in the long term. This leads either to the extinction of the weaker competitor or to an evolutionary or behavioral shift toward a different ecological niche. The principle has been paraphrased in the maxim "complete competitors can not coexist".
The metabolic theory of ecology (MTE) is an extension of Kleiber's law and posits that the metabolic rate of organisms is the fundamental biological rate that governs most observed patterns in ecology. MTE is part of a larger set of theory known as metabolic scaling theory that attempts to provide a unified theory for the importance of metabolism in driving pattern and process in biology from the level of cells all the way to the biosphere.
Kleiber's law, named after Max Kleiber for his biology work in the early 1930s, is the observation that, for the vast majority of animals, an animal's metabolic rate scales to the ¾ power of the animal's mass. Symbolically: if q0 is the animal's metabolic rate, and M the animal's mass, then Kleiber's law states that q0 ~ M¾. Thus, over the same timespan, a cat having a mass 100 times that of a mouse will consume only about 32 times the energy the mouse uses.
The dynamic energy budget (DEB) theory is a formal metabolic theory which provides a single quantitative framework to dynamically describe the aspects of metabolism of all living organisms at the individual level, based on assumptions about energy uptake, storage, and utilization of various substances. The DEB theory adheres to stringent thermodynamic principles, is motivated by universally observed patterns, is non-species specific, and links different levels of biological organization as prescribed by the implications of energetics. Models based on the DEB theory have been successfully applied to over a 1000 species with real-life applications ranging from conservation, aquaculture, general ecology, and ecotoxicology. The theory is contributing to the theoretical underpinning of the emerging field of metabolic ecology.
Species richness, or biodiversity, increases from the poles to the tropics for a wide variety of terrestrial and marine organisms, often referred to as the latitudinal diversity gradient (LDG). The LDG is one of the most widely recognized patterns in ecology. The LDG has been observed to varying degrees in Earth's past. A parallel trend has been found with elevation, though this is less well-studied
Synthesizing units (SUs) are generalized enzymes that follow the rules of classic enzyme kinetics with two modifications:
Dynamic reserve, in the context of the dynamic energy budget theory, refers to the set of metabolites that an organism can use for metabolic purposes.. These chemical compounds can have active metabolic functions, however. They are not just "set apart for later use." Reserve differs from structure in the first place by its dynamics. Reserve has an implied turnover, because it is synthesized from food and used by metabolic processes occurring in cells. The turnover of structure depends on the maintenance of an organism. Maintenance is not required for reserve. A freshly laid egg consists almost exclusively of reserve, and hardly respires. The chemical compounds in the reserve have the same turnover, while that in the structure can have a different turnover, and so it depends on the compound.
Evolutionary physiology is the study of physiological evolution, which is to say, the manner in which the functional characteristics of individuals in a population of organisms have responded to selection across multiple generations during the history of the population.
(John) Philip Grime is an ecologist and emeritus professor at the University of Sheffield. He is best known for his Universal adaptive strategy theory, for the unimodal relationship between species richness and site productivity, for the Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis, for the DST classification and, with Simon Pierce, universal adaptive strategy theory (UAST) and the twin filter model of community assembly and eco-evolutionary dynamics.
In ecology, a priority effect is the impact that a particular species can have on community development due to prior arrival at a site.
In the field of population biology, local adaptation is when a population of organisms evolves (adapts) to be more well-suited to its local environment than other members of the same species. Local adaptation requires that different populations of the same species experience different natural selection, due to differences in the abiotic or biotic environment the populations occupy. For example, if a species lives across a wide range of temperatures, populations from warm areas may have better heat tolerance than populations of the same species that live in the cold part of its geographic range.
Capital breeding and income breeding refer to the methods by which some organisms time breeding and use resources to finance breeding. In the models, capital breeders breed when they reach a threshold condition, which decreases throughout the breeding season. However, the original definition of a capital breeder has changed, with the more recent definition being organisms that use energy stores built up before reproduction to breed. This is in comparison to income breeders, who breed after certain levels, which do not change, of increase in condition are reached and who use energy gained during breeding to finance reproduction. Income breeders who are growing especially fast hold off the development of their offspring after a threshold is reached so they can produce more offspring, although this does not occur in slower growing income breeders. An organism can be both a capital and an income breeder; the parasitoid Eupelmus vuilletti, for example, is an income breeder in terms of sugars, but a capital breeder in terms of lipids. A different example of the interaction between capital and income breeding is found in Vipera aspis; although these snakes are capital breeders, they lay larger litters when food is abundant, which is a characteristic of income breeders.
The temperature-size rule denotes the plastic response of organismal body size to environmental temperature variation. Organisms exhibiting a plastic response are capable of allowing their body size to fluctuate with environmental temperature. First coined by David Atkinson in 1996, it is considered to be a unique case of Bergmann's rule that has been observed in plants, animals, birds, and a wide variety of ectotherms. Although exceptions to the temperature-size rule exist, recognition of this widespread "rule" has amassed efforts to understand the physiological mechanisms underlying growth and body size variation in differing environmental temperatures.
Allison K. Shaw is an American ecologist and professor at the University of Minnesota. She studies the factors that drive the movements of organisms.
Susan Patricia Harrison is a professor of ecology at the University of California, Davis who works on the dynamics of natural populations and ecological diversity. She is a fellow of the Ecological Society of America and the California Academy of Sciences. She has previously served as vice president of the American Society of Naturalists. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2018.
Taxon cycles refer to a biogeographical theory of how species evolve through range expansions and contractions over time associated with adaptive shifts in the ecology and morphology of species. The taxon cycle concept was explicitly formulated by biologist E. O. Wilson in 1961 after he surveyed the distributions, habitats, behavior and morphology of ant species in the Melanesian archipelago.
References
- 1 2 Maino, James L.; Kearney, Michael R.; Nisbet, Roger M.; Kooijman, Sebastiaan A. L. M. (2014-01-01). "Reconciling theories for metabolic scaling". Journal of Animal Ecology. 83 (1): 20–29. doi:10.1111/1365-2656.12085. ISSN 1365-2656. PMID 23668377.
- 1 2 Kearney, Michael R.; White, Craig R. (2012-11-01). "Testing Metabolic Theories" (PDF). The American Naturalist. 180 (5): 546–565. doi:10.1086/667860. ISSN 0003-0147. PMID 23070317.
- ↑ van der Meer, Jaap (2006). "Metabolic theories in ecology". Trends in Ecology & Evolution. 21 (3): 136–140. doi:10.1016/j.tree.2005.11.004. ISSN 0169-5347. PMID 16701489.
- ↑ van der Meer, Jaap (2006). "An introduction to Dynamic Energy Budget (DEB) models with special emphasis on parameter estimation". Journal of Sea Research. 56 (2): 85–102. Bibcode:2006JSR....56...85V. doi:10.1016/j.seares.2006.03.001. ISSN 1385-1101.
- ↑ Kearney, Michael R.; White, Craig R. (2012-11-01). "Testing Metabolic Theories" (PDF). The American Naturalist. 180 (5): 546–565. doi:10.1086/667860. ISSN 0003-0147. PMID 23070317.
- ↑ White, Craig R.; Kearney, Michael R.; Matthews, Philip G. D.; Kooijman, Sebastiaan A. L. M.; Marshall, Dustin J. (2011-12-01). "A Manipulative Test of Competing Theories for Metabolic Scaling" (PDF). The American Naturalist. 178 (6): 746–754. doi:10.1086/662666. ISSN 0003-0147. PMID 22089869.
- ↑ Lika, Konstadia; Nisbet, Roger M. (2000-10-01). "A Dynamic Energy Budget model based on partitioning of net production". Journal of Mathematical Biology. 41 (4): 361–386. doi:10.1007/s002850000049. ISSN 0303-6812. PMID 11103872.