Metabolic scaling across succession: Do individual rates predict community‐level energy use?

Abstract

A major goal of metabolic ecology is to make predictions across scales such that individual metabolic rates might be used to predict the metabolic rates of populations and communities, but the success of these predictions is unclear given the rarity of tests. Given that older communities tend to have species with slower life histories and larger body sizes, we hypothesized that the metabolism of whole communities should scale allometrically with their mass across successional stages. We created experimental chronosequences of sessile marine invertebrate communities in the field. We then (1) determined the metabolic scaling of these whole communities across successional stages of different mass and (2) tested whether the sum of individual metabolic rates for the dominant species could predict overall community metabolism. Contrary to what we expected based on metabolic theory and succession theory, community metabolism scaled isometrically with mass across succession, despite the mean body size of dominant individuals within the communities increasing over time. We resolved this paradox by estimating community metabolism based on individual metabolic rates for the dominant species in the community. We show that non‐random changes in the membership of the species maintain mass‐specific metabolic rates of the whole community invariant across succession despite changes in size structure. These results suggest that simple assumptions about how community‐level processes scale up from species are unlikely to be correct, because community turnover is non‐random with respect to metabolic rate. Nevertheless, with the appropriate parametrization, the sum of individual species rates can predict the function of the community as a whole. A http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2435.13103/suppinfo is available for this article.

Testing MacArthur's minimisation principle: do communities minimise energy wastage during succession?

“…To estimate oxygen saturation within the chambers, we used standard methods as described in Ghedini et al . (, in press). We estimated dissolved oxygen concentration every 30 s for 6 h, removed the plates from the chambers and weighed the water in the chamber.…”

“…To estimate the feeding rate and metabolic rate of the community, we placed each plate into its own metabolic chamber (see Ghedini et al . , in press for details). All estimates of community feeding and metabolism were conducted in a constant temperature room at a temperature of 18 °C.…”

“…), and can be used to create chronosequences of successional stages that are tractable to manipulation (Ghedini et al . , in press), such that whole community metabolism and feeding rates can be tested in laboratory assays.…”

The Metabolic Basis of Fat Tail Distributions in Populations and Community Fluctuations

“…By contrast, density estimates obtained for all species present in local communities often produce weak triangular or polygonal (i.e., constraint envelope) relationships with exponents shallower than −α, indicating that that larger-bodied species flux more energy (Marquet et al, 1995;White et al, 2007;Barneche et al, 2016). Under the hypothesis that only the abundance of dominant species are constrained by resource availability (Barneche et al, 2016;Ghedini et al, 2018), it is possible to derive some general predictions about population and community dynamics (Figure 1).…”

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“…Our isometric metabolic relationships are quantitatively consistent with previous reports of fouling communities in the same region (Ghedini et al . ). The total energy consumption of the fouling community living on artificial structures in Port Phillip Bay and Moreton Bay was estimated by multiplying the mean metabolic rate of a quadrat by the total man‐made underwater surface area in each bay (WebPanel 1b).…”