Counting the cost of living in modern and fossil animals

精力充沛的生活成本决定了动物如何与环境互动。动物获取和消耗能量的速度决定了它们可以在哪里以及如何生活，以及它们对生态和环境变化的相对敏感度。高能性状面临着强烈的选择，形态特征通常被认为意味着生物高能性状的变化。能量通常是通过评估产热量或氧气消耗率来衡量的。这两种方法都极难在野外条件下或化石样本上应用。因此，尽管能量消耗在生态学、进化论和保护生理学上具有基本的重要性，但我们很少有关于现代或化石环境下野生动物生活的实际能量成本的比较定量信息。最近，基于碳同位素组成(Chung等人2019年)、痕量金属(Limberg等人2018年)和保存在古代生物矿物中的呼吸大分子浓度(Weimann等人2022)，提出了实现代谢率的化学指标。该项目将改进、改进和相互比较现场代谢率的替代指标。你将应用新陈代谢指标来提供有关新陈代谢水平如何在现代生物和化石生物之间变化的第一批经验数据，将生理学和进化生态学联系起来。

The energetic cost of living defines how animals interact with their environment. The rate at which animals capture and expend energy dictates where and how they can live, and their relative sensitivity to ecological and environmental change. Energetic traits face strong selection, and morphological features are often assumed to imply changes in bioenergetic traits. Energy is typically measured by assessing heat production or the oxygen consumption rates. Both of these approaches are extremely difficult to apply in field conditions or on fossil samples. Consequently, despite the fundamental importance of energy expenditure in ecology, evolution and conservation physiology, we have very little comparative quantitative information on the realised energetic costs of living for wild animals in either modern or fossil settings. Recently, chemical proxies for realised metabolic rate have been proposed, based on carbon isotope compositions (Chung et al 2019), trace metals (Limberg et al 2018) and concentrations of respiratory macromolecules preserved in ancient biominerals (Weimann et al 2022). This project will refine, improve and intercompare proxies for field metabolic rate. You will apply metabolic proxies to provide the first empirical data for how metabolic level varies among modern and fossil organisms, linking physiology and evolutionary ecology.