Why does metabolic rate scale with body size? (103050)

Metabolic rates of all organisms change (scale) with body size, but usually out of proportion; for a given increase in size, metabolic rate increases less. Why this is so, is one of the big unanswered questions in biology. This project will use different species of fish to test the hypothesis that growth in early life stages shapes metabolic scaling, and that variation in selection pressures on early-life growth causes systematic variation in metabolic scaling among taxa, from ontogenetic to evolutionary levels.

Funding
The project is funded by a Villum Experiment research grant (40713) from Villum Foundation.

Research area: Fish Biology