'Like a video game with health points,' energy budgets explain evolutionary body size
Friday, December 20, 2019 - 09:10
in Biology & Nature
Budgeting resources isn't just a problem for humans preparing a holiday dinner, or squirrels storing up nuts for the winter. A new model of how animals budget their energy sheds light on how they live and explains why they tend to evolve toward larger body sizes. The research proposes that animal energy budgets are governed by a key mechanism: resource variation -- a measure of how spread out or clumped up food and water are.