Is metabolism a red herring when predicting fish responses to climate change?

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Rationale:Metabolic rate is the rate at which an animal takes in energy and uses it for survival, growth and reproduction. Some scientists suggest that metabolic rate can be used to explain everything in ecology, including individual life histories, species distributions, and how ecosystems respond to climate change. This project will explore this exciting idea in marine fishes.Often metabolic studies use basal metabolic rate (BMR), measured when the animal is inactive. Animals in the wild may behave very differently from inactive animals in laboratory tanks, in which case using metabolic theory to predict species response to climate change could be very misleading. In this project we will ask whether metabolic theory 'works' when applied to field metabolic rate (FMR), which includes the energetic demands of foraging, movement and reproduction. FMR is difficult to measure in marine animals, but a novel geochemical proxy has recently been developed for marine fishes (Trueman et al 2016).This project will assemble the first large, statistically comparable dataset of FMR within marine fishes, and test the following hypotheses:FMR scales systematically with body size and temperature. Phylogenetic relationships and/or functional groups influence FMR scaling.FMR is a better predictor of macroecological patterns than BMR.