Heat Dissipation And Energetic Efficiency In Animal Anoxibiosis - Economy Contra Power

This survey on calorimetry and thermodynamics of anoxibiosis applies classical and irreversible thermodynamics to interpret experimental, direct calorimetric results in order to elucidate the sequential activation of various biochemical pathways. First, the concept of direct and indirect calorimetry is expanded to incorporate the thermochemistry of aerobic and anoxic metabolism in living cells and organisms. Calorimetric studies done under normoxia as well as under physiological and environmental anoxia are presented and assessed in terms of ATP turnover rate. Present evidence suggests that unknown sources of energy in freshwater and marine invertebrates under long-term anoxia may be important. During physiological hypoxia, thermodynamically grossly inefficient pathways sustain high metabolic rates for brief periods. On the contrary, under long-term environmental anoxia, low steady-state heat dissipation is linked to the more efficient succinate, propionate, and acetate pathways. In the second part of this paper these relationships are discussed in the context of linear, irreversible thermodynamics. The calorimetric and biochemical trends during aerobic-anoxic transitions are consistent with thermodynamic optimum functions of catabolic pathways. The theory predicts a decrease of rate with an increase of thermodynamic efficiency; therefore maximum rate and maximum efficiency are mutually exclusive. Cellular changes of pH and adenylate phosphorylation potential are recognized as regulatory mechanisms in the energetic switching to propionate production. While enzyme kinetics provides one key for understanding metabolic regulation, our insight remains incomplete without a complementary thermodynamic analysis of kinetic control in energetically coupled pathways.

Competition Relatedness And Efficiency

Seger has argued that, if a law of diminishing returns of personal fitness with increasing consumption of a limiting resource applies, a greater increment to inclusive fitness3 may accrue to an individual by sharing the resource with its relatives than by excluding them. That is, from the point of view of an individual's inclusive fitness, there will exist an optimal relation between resource abundance, conversion efficiency (in terms of increment in personal fitness per resource unit consumed) and competitor abundance and relatedness to the subject. Here, this is rendered more concrete by deriving expressions for the optimum consumption rate for any one of a number of related individuals competing for a finite resource.