Figure 1.

Limits and scopes of mass-specific metabolic rate in the living organisms. Solid and open circles: endogenous and growth mass-specific metabolic rates of prokaryotes. Boxes, diamonds and triangles (MIN): metabolic rates of eukaryotes in various energy-saving regimes. Dotted circles (MAX): record mass-specific metabolic rates per unit working tissue mass during peak activities in various organisms. Asterisks: basal metabolic rates of whales and elephants. Solid lines: fitted equations for endogenous/standard/basal metabolic rate in, U, unicellular eukaryotes at 20 °C (Vladimirova & Zotin 1985), A, terrestrial arthropods at 25 °C (Lighton et al. 2001) and, M, mammals (Peters 1983), respectively. P, prokaryotes. Crossed circles: standard metabolic rate corresponding to body size class with maximum species numbers in terrestrial arthropods and mammals; mean endogenous respiration of the studied prokaryotes and unicellular eukaryotes (Vladimirova & Zotin 1985). Dashed lines: the uniform minimum, maximum and hypothesized optimum values of mass-specific metabolic rate of the living matter. Numeric values and literature sources for all points shown in the figure are given in the Electronic Appendix.