University of Maine School of Marine Sciences, Orono, ME 04469, USA.
Oecologia. 2012 Oct;170(2):289-95. doi: 10.1007/s00442-012-2313-0. Epub 2012 Apr 4.
A major goal of modern ecology is to understand macroecological patterns based on their mechanistic underpinnings. The metabolic theory of ecology predicts a monotonic increase of biodiversity with temperature based on the principles of metabolism. For marine copepods, observations have shown that while biodiversity does increase with temperature, the theory's prediction overestimates the slope of this relationship by a factor of two. By relaxing the theory's assumption that size is invariant with respect to temperature, and by incorporating a mechanistic description of copepod development into the theory, we provide an adjusted prediction that agrees with the observed relationship. The addition of development into the theory adds the potential to refine the prediction for a wider range of taxa, to account for discrepancies between prediction and observations, and to describe a wider variety of temperature-richness relationships.
现代生态学的一个主要目标是基于其机械基础来理解宏观生态学模式。生态学的代谢理论基于代谢原理预测生物多样性会随着温度单调增加。对于海洋桡足类动物，观察表明，虽然生物多样性确实会随着温度的升高而增加，但该理论的预测高估了这种关系的斜率，是实际值的两倍。通过放宽理论关于温度不变的假设，并将桡足类动物发育的机制描述纳入理论，我们提供了一个调整后的预测，该预测与观察到的关系一致。在理论中加入发育过程有可能为更广泛的分类群完善预测，解释预测与观察之间的差异，并描述更广泛的温度丰富关系。
