Skip to content
Login Register

#energy efficiency

3 public questions tagged with this topic.

Survivorship and rK Strategies

Which strategy is most energy-efficient over long lifespans?

Iteroparity spreads reproductive effort across many breeding events and is usually favored when adults have a reasonable chance of surviving between seasons. A long-lived organism can reproduce repeatedly without paying the extreme one-time cost associated with semelparity, while also buffering failure in any single year. Calling it energy-efficient is shorthand for allocating resources over time, not a claim that repeated breeding has no energetic cost. Life-history traits should be interpreted as correlated tendencies rather than rigid packages. Adult survival, juvenile mortality, body size,

Ref: Ecology: Concepts and Applications, Molles, 9th Ed., Ch. 12

View Details
Ecosystem Ecology

Ectotherms vs endotherms: efficiency pairing:

“Endo high DE, Ecto high EE” for ectotherms vs endotherms: efficiency pairing. This relationship follows from the ecological mechanism represented by the terms in the item, not merely from an association between their names. Rates depend on temperature, moisture, substrate quality, consumer physiology, and the elemental balance between organisms and their food. These controls explain why the same process can differ among terrestrial, freshwater, and marine systems without changing its definition. The remaining alternatives—“Endo low DE, Ecto high EE”, “Endo high DE, Ecto low EE”, “Endo low DE,

Ref: Ecology: From Individuals to Ecosystems, Begon et al., 5th Ed., Ch. 17-19

View Details
Ecosystem Ecology

Correct about ectotherm and endotherm efficiency:

The keyed combination is A and C, yet the underlying assertions A–D are missing. In general, ectotherms spend relatively little assimilated energy maintaining a constant high body temperature and often show greater production efficiency than endotherms. Endotherms have high respiratory costs for thermoregulation, although assimilation efficiency also depends strongly on food quality and digestive physiology. These accepted principles support comparison of efficiencies, but they cannot establish which absent lettered statements correspond to them. Reliable inference requires the complete experi

Ref: Ecology: From Individuals to Ecosystems, Begon et al., 5th Ed., Ch. 17-19

View Details