Toward a quantitative nutritional ecology: the right-angled mixture triangle
Toward a quantitative nutritional ecology: the right-angled mixture triangle
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DOI：
10.1890/10-1707.1
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发表时间：
2011-08-01
影响因子：
6.1
通讯作者：
Raubenheimer, David
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Raubenheimer, David
营养生态学最近的一个进展领域是人们越来越认识到，营养表型最好在多维背景下理解，其中觅食被视为平衡多种营养素的摄入和使用以满足复杂和动态的营养需求的过程。许多实验室研究表明，这种观点可以对未解决的问题产生新的见解，并为产生新的假设提供框架。相比之下，在功能生物学家最感兴趣的竞技场领域，这种多维观点的进展一直很缓慢。其中一个原因是，在实验室实验中广泛使用的营养几何框架侧重于营养素的量（例如，需要、食用或保留），并且对于大多数自由放养的动物来说，这样的数据通常非常难以或不可能收集。此外，基于田间的营养生态学中的许多问题涉及以比例表示的混合物的比较（例如，食物、饮食、身体或粪便组成），而不是绝对量。然而，迄今为止，营养生态学还没有为此建立几何框架。在这里，我推荐一种营养混合物的几何分析方法，并通过重新分析已发表的数据来说明其在各种情况下的使用。尽管它的简单，这种方法具有相当大的希望，进一步研究基于实地的营养生态学。
A recent area of progress in nutritional ecology is a growing awareness that nutritional phenotypes are best understood in a multidimensional context, where foraging is viewed as a process of balancing the intake and use of multiple nutrients to satisfy complex and dynamic nutrient needs. Numerous laboratory studies have shown that this view can yield novel insights into unresolved questions and provide a framework for generating new hypotheses. By contrast, progress with this multidimensional view has been slow in the arena of ultimate interest to functional biologists, the field. One reason for this is that the Geometric Framework for nutrition that has been extensively used in laboratory experiments focuses on amounts of nutrients (e.g., required, eaten, or retained), and such data are typically very difficult or impossible to collect for most free-ranging animals. Further, many problems in field-based nutritional ecology involve comparisons of mixtures that are expressed as proportions (e.g., food, diet, body, or fecal compositions), rather than absolute amounts. As yet, however, no geometric framework has been established in nutritional ecology for this. Here I recommend an approach for the geometric analysis of nutritional mixtures, and illustrate its use in a variety of contexts by reanalyzing published data. Despite its simplicity, this approach holds considerable promise for furthering the study of field-based nutritional ecology.