Effects of fat and exoskeletal mass on the mass scaling of metabolism in Carabidae beetles

Abstract

The rate at which organisms metabolize resources and consume oxygen is tightly linked to body mass. Typically, there is a sub-linear allometric relationship between metabolic rates and body mass (mass-scaling exponent b < 1). The origin of this pattern remains one of the most intriguing and hotly debated topics in evolutionary physiology. A decrease in mass-specific metabolic rates in larger organisms might reflect disproportionate increases in body components with low metabolic activity, such as storage and skeletal tissues. Addressing this hypothesis, we studied standard metabolic rates, body mass, and fat and exoskeletal mass in males and females from 15 species of Carabidae beetles. There was a sub-linear allometric relationship of metabolic rate with body mass: b = 0.72 (phylogeny not considered), b = 0.54 (phylogeny considered). The latter exponent was significantly lower than 0.75, which is sometimes regarded as a universal exponent value in the mass scaling of metabolic rates. Contrary to our hypothesis, the relative contribution of fat and the exoskeleton to body mass decreased, rather than increased with body mass, as indicated by the sub-linear allometric mass scaling of both components (b < 1). Supporting the role of metabolically inert body components in shaping metabolic scaling, the exponents (b) for metabolism became slightly smaller (b = 0.70, phylogeny not considered; 0.52, phylogeny considered) when we removed lipids and the exoskeleton from body mass calculations and considered only the lean mass of soft tissue in the mass scaling. Overall, our results indicate that, in beetles, the relative content of metabolically inert components changes across species according to species-specific body mass. Nevertheless, we did not find evidence that this changing contribution plays a central role in the origin of interspecific metabolic scaling in carabids. Our findings stress the need for finding alternative explanations, at least in carabids, for the origin of the mass scaling of metabolic rates.