Scaling individual metabolism to populations and communities

The temperature dependence of highly conserved subcellular metabolic systems affects ecological patterns and processes across scales, from organisms to ecosystems. However, a major gap in our knowledge of how temperature-dependent subcellular metabolism may constrain higher level ecological processes has been at the level of populations. Using theory and experiments, we performed the first critical test of the hypothesis that temperature effects on subcellular metabolism constrain the dynamics of populations and their equilibrium abundance, making a fundamental advance in our understanding of how metabolic constraints shape population responses to changing environments.

Read the paper:

Bernhardt, J.R., Sunday, J.M. and M.I. O’Connor, 2018. Metabolic theory and the temperature-size rule explain the temperature dependence of population carrying capacity. The American Naturalist. [data]