Common metabolic constraints on dive duration in endothermic and ectothermic vertebrates
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Ecology, Zoology
- Keywords
- diving behavior, metabolic theory, metabolism, thermal ecology, oxygen storage, allometry, scaling
- Copyright
- © 2016 Hayward et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. Common metabolic constraints on dive duration in endothermic and ectothermic vertebrates. PeerJ Preprints 4:e2334v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2334v1
Abstract
Dive duration in air-breathing vertebrates is thought to be constrained by the volume of oxygen stored in the body and the rate at which it is consumed (i.e., “o xygen store/usage hypothesis” ). The body mass-dependence of dive duration among endothermic vertebrates is largely supportive of this model, but previous analyses of ectothermic vertebrates show no such body mass-dependence. Here we show that dive duration in both endotherms and ectotherms largely support the oxygen store/usage hypothesis after accounting for the well-established effects of temperature on oxygen consumption rates. Analyses of the body mass and temperature dependence of dive duration in 181 species of endothermic vertebrates and 29 species of ectothermic vertebrates show that dive duration increases as a power law with body mass, and decreases exponentially with increasing temperature. Thus, in the case of ectothermic vertebrates, changes in environmental temperature will likely impact the foraging ecology of divers.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.
Supplemental Information
Body Mass, Temperature, and Dive Duration Data for Vertebrates
Body mass (M, in g), temperature (T, in oC), median dive time (median DT, in minutes), maximum dive time (max DT, in minutes), and the per species median and max. dive time data (in minutes) for amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals.