Metabolism Basics
The three main ways animals allocate their energy.
What are maintenance, biosynthesis, and external activity?
The resting metabolic rate for endotherms.
What is the Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR)?
The three macromolecules that make up most animal bodies.
What are proteins, lipids, and carbohydrates?
The four main ways heat moves between objects.
What are conduction, convection, radiation, and evaporation?
A short-term, reversible reduction in metabolic rate and temperature.
What is torpor?
The measure of how efficiently an animal uses energy, often by O₂ consumption and CO₂ production.
What is metabolic rate?
The resting metabolic rate for ectotherms.
What is the Standard Metabolic Rate (SMR)?
The difference between amino acids and essential amino acids.
What are amino acids the building blocks of proteins, and essential ones must come from diet?
The continuum describing animals that make their own heat versus those that rely on the environment.
What is endothermy vs ectothermy?
A long-term period of torpor during cold conditions.
What is hibernation?
The equation for aerobic metabolism.
What is Fuel + O₂ → CO₂ + H₂O + ATP + Heat?
The metabolic rate for animals doing normal daily activities.
What is the Field Metabolic Rate (FMR)?
The “just in time” strategy of protein use means this.
What is producing or using proteins only when needed to save energy?
The short-term physiological or behavioral response to temperature changes in ectotherms.
What is an acute response, such as basking or changing metabolic rate (Q10 effect)?
A similar state to hibernation but used to survive heat or drought.
What is aestivation?
This describes the flexibility of an animal’s energy budget over time.
What does it mean that energy budgets are plastic?
Larger animals use more total energy but less energy per gram of tissue.
What is the relationship between body size and metabolic rate?
The fatty acid notation 18:2ω6 tells you this.
What is an 18-carbon chain with 2 double bonds, first at the 6th carbon from the omega end?
The process where blood vessels narrow or widen to conserve or release heat.
What are vasoconstriction and vasodilation?
The difference between freeze-tolerant and freeze-intolerant species.
What is that freeze-tolerant species survive internal ice formation while intolerant use antifreeze compounds?
The measure comparing O₂ used to CO₂ produced to determine diet composition.
What is the Respiratory Quotient (RQ)?
The explanation that smaller animals lose heat faster and must use energy more quickly.
What is Rubner’s explanation of allometric scaling?
Fermentation-based digestion and enzyme-based digestion differ in these two ways.
What are the chemical processes (microbial vs enzymatic) and the digestive anatomies (longer guts vs shorter)?
The system where warm and cool blood flow in opposite directions to exchange heat efficiently.
What is countercurrent heat exchange?
Ectotherms like tuna and bees can exhibit this type of partial heat generation.
What is regional endothermy or facultative endothermy?