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Does Body Size Affect Endotherms Metabolic Rates?

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We have noticed in other experiments that smaller animals have a higher surface-to-volume (SA/V) ratios than larger animals with a lower SA/V. After reviewing through articles, we hypothesized that endotherms with small bodies will have a higher metabolic rate than endotherms with large bodies. We tested this by making 6 clay cubes (different sizes) and placed them in ice for 10 minutes and measured them in 2-minute intervals. Our results supported our hypothesis because the larger clay with the smallest SA/V had the slowest cooling rate while the smallest cube with the higher SA/V had the fastest cooling rate.

Introduction

In this lab, we are going to try to answer the question, Does body size affect endotherms metabolic rates? This question is very controversial among scientists. They’ve only agreed on one thing, there are different scalings between animals, but they don 't know how that affects metabolism and why (Hoppler and Weibel 2005). Some scientist’s studies show that body size in endotherms does affect metabolism rate due to SA/V ratios. The ratios affect the endotherms metabolism based on how high or low the SA/V ratio is. An animal with a larger SA/V ratio puts off more heat to their environment. This results in smaller animals having to burn through their food more to maintain their body temperature (“Unit 4 Demos More on Metabolic Rate”). What led us to the formation of our experiment was the experiment performed in the article Smith et al. (2015). In

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