ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2024
Estimating the relationship between fitness and metabolic rate: which rate should we use?
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Metabolic traits are shaped by phylogenetic conservatism and environment, not just body size.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The metabolic costs of meiotic drive.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Metabolic-behavioural performance for overwinter survival in a wild rodent.Biology letters · 2025Article
- Consequences of the cost of living: is variation in metabolic rate evolutionarily significant?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Intergenerational plasticity aligns with temperature-dependent selection on offspring metabolic rates.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
As physiologists seek to better understand how and why metabolism varies, they have focused on how metabolic rate covaries with fitness-that is, selection. Evolutionary biologists have developed a sophisticated framework for exploring selection, but there are particular challenges associated with estimating selection on metabolic rate owing to its allometric relationship with body mass. Most researchers estimate selection on mass and absolute metabolic rate; or selection on mass and mass-independent metabolic rate (MIMR)-the residuals generated from a nonlinear regression. These approaches are sometimes treated as synonymous: their coefficients are often interpreted in the same way. Here, we show that these approaches are not equivalent because absolute metabolic rate and MIMR are different traits. We also show that it is difficult to make sound biological inferences about selection on absolute metabolic rate because its causal relationship with mass is enigmatic. By contrast, MIMR requires less-desirable statistical practices (i.e. residuals as a predictor), but provides clearer causal pathways. Moreover, we argue that estimates of selection on MIMR have more meaningful interpretations for physiologists interested in the drivers of variation in metabolic allometry. This article is part of the theme issue 'The evolutionary significance of variation in metabolic rates'.
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