'Like a video game with health points,' energy budgets explain evolutionary body size

(Santa Fe Institute) 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, published in PNAS, 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.

Source: EurekAlert! - Biology - December 18, 2019 Category: Biology Source Type: news