The DOI matches its Crossref record; 145 of the 145 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The scaling and temperature dependence of vertebrate metabolism
Open accessAbstract
Body size and temperature are primary determinants of metabolic rate, and the standard metabolic rate (SMR) of animals ranging in size from unicells to mammals has been thought to be proportional to body mass (M) raised to the power of three-quarters for over 40 years. However, recent evidence from rigorously selected datasets suggests that this is not the case for birds and mammals. To determine whether the influence of body mass on the metabolic rate of vertebrates is indeed universal, we compiled SMR measurements for 938 species spanning six orders of magnitude variation in mass. When normalized to a common temperature of 38 °C, the SMR scaling exponents of fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals are significantly heterogeneous. This suggests both that there is no universal metabolic allometry and that models that attempt to explain only quarter-power scaling of metabolic rate are unlikely to succeed.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
A General Model for the Origin of Allometric Scaling Laws in Biology
West, G. B., Brown, J. H., & Enquist, B. J. (1997) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.276.5309.122 · Cited by 5,016
Effects of Size and Temperature on Metabolic Rate
Gillooly, J. F., Brown, J. H., West, G. B., Savage, V. M., & Charnov, E. L. (2001) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1061967 · Cited by 3,810
The Fourth Dimension of Life: Fractal Geometry and Allometric Scaling of Organisms
West, G. B., Brown, J. H., & Enquist, B. J. (1999) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.284.5420.1677 · Cited by 1,718
Size and form in efficient transportation networks
Banavar, J. R., Maritan, A., & Rinaldo, A. (1999) · Nature · doi:10.1038/20144 · Cited by 854
Energy metabolism as related to body size and respiratory surfaces, and its evolution
Hemmingsen, A. M., Hemmingsen, E. A., & Hemmingsen, S. M. (1960) · Medical Entomology and Zoology · Cited by 852
Mammalian basal metabolic rate is proportional to body mass 2/3
White, C. R., & Seymour, R. S. (2003) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.0436428100 · Cited by 720
Self-citationThe predominance of quarter‐power scaling in biology
Savage, V. M., Gillooly, J. F., Woodruff, W. H., West, G. B., Allen, A. P., Enquist, B. J., & Brown, J. H. (2004) · Functional Ecology · doi:10.1111/j.0269-8463.2004.00856.x · Cited by 713
The Advantages of Ectothermy for Tetrapods
Pough, F. H. (1980) · The American Naturalist · doi:10.1086/283547 · Cited by 685
Re-Examination of the “3/4-Law” of Metabolism
DODDS, P. S., ROTHMAN, D. H., & WEITZ, J. S. (2001) · Journal of Theoretical Biology · doi:10.1006/jtbi.2000.2238 · Cited by 589
Allometric cascade as a unifying principle of body mass effects on metabolism
Darveau, C.-A., Suarez, R. K., Andrews, R. D., & Hochachka, P. W. (2002) · Nature · doi:10.1038/417166a · Cited by 494
Cited by
Clark, T. D., Sandblom, E., & Jutfelt, F. (2013) · Journal of Experimental Biology · doi:10.1242/jeb.084251 · Cited by 906
Functional ecology of fish: current approaches and future challenges
Villéger, S., Brosse, S., Mouchet, M., Mouillot, D., & Vanni, M. J. (2017) · Aquatic Sciences · doi:10.1007/s00027-017-0546-z · Cited by 538
Allio, R., Donega, S., Galtier, N., & Nabholz, B. (2017) · Molecular Biology and Evolution · doi:10.1093/molbev/msx197 · Cited by 417
A unifying explanation for diverse metabolic scaling in animals and plants
Glazier, D. S. (2010) · Biological Reviews · doi:10.1111/j.1469-185x.2009.00095.x · Cited by 403
Is metabolic rate a universal ‘pacemaker’ for biological processes?
Glazier, D. S. (2015) · Biological Reviews · doi:10.1111/brv.12115 · Cited by 335
Metadata
- Authors
- White, C. R., Phillips, N. F., & Seymour, R. S.
- Venue
- Biology Letters
- Publisher
- The Royal Society
- Published
- 2005-09-16
- Volume
- 2
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 125-127
- ISSN
- 1744-9561 (ISSN-L)
- 1744-957X
- OpenAlex
- W2117467811
- Cited by
- 411
- References
- 145
- FWCI
- 9.49
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The scaling and temperature dependence of vertebrate metabolism. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1098/rsbl.2005.0378
- The paper
- White, C. R., Phillips, N. F., & Seymour, R. S. (2006). The scaling and temperature dependence of vertebrate metabolism. Biology Letters. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2005.0378
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.