| Comments |
P.527 2nd paragraph: "Moreover, the body mass of a species tightly constrains the rates of all biological reactions within the organism. Factors such as energy use and productivity scale tightly with mass in all living taxa from bacteria to vertebrates and plants (Kleiber 1932, Ernest et al. 2003). Such allometric scaling of metabolism has profound ecological and evolutionary consequences. For example, it means that the mass-specific energy demand of an animal the size of a deer mouse is ∼20 times greater than that of a giraffe, resulting in differences in the types of food that can be acquired and assimilated. It also results in a negative relationship between the population density of taxa and mass (Damuth 1981, Enquist et al. 1998, Ernest et al. 2003), which can have implications for community structure and evolutionary processes such as extinction and origination (Harnik et al. 2012)." |