Figure 3. Influence of the organ-tissue scaling exponent 
on an organ-tissue’s contribution to the positive y-intercept and to REE in linear models.
Panel A depicts the contribution to the y-intercept by the i-th individual organ-tissue REE in terms of 
, where 
is the value of total body mass about which the Taylor linearization is performed. The contribution to the y-intercept is expressed as a multiplier of 
calculated as 
. The individual organ-tissue’s contribution to the y-intercept is maximized given a fixed numerical value of 
when 
is ∼0.70 for an animal with 
= 30 g, as predicted by Eq. 12. Importantly, there is a substantial range of 
values that more than double 
. Panel B depicts the hypothetical effect of varying the 
value on both the y-intercept and slope of the hypothetical liver REE – 
relationship assuming that the allometric scaling coefficient 
remains fixed at 0.36
(rescaled from 22.6 
, the value reported by [27] and depicted in Figure 2A). Note that the sensitivity of the slope to variation in 
suggests that group differences in the 
of the liver, a small organ with a big impact on whole-body REE, could contribute to the problem of differing between-group slopes of whole-body REE in phenotyping studies.