Energetics of the smallest: do bacteria breathe at the same rate as whales?

Abstract

Power laws describing the dependence of metabolic rate on body mass have been established for many taxa, but not for prokaryotes, despite the ecological dominance of the smallest living beings. Our analysis of 80 prokaryote species with cell volumes ranging more than 1 000 000-fold revealed no significant relationship between mass-specific metabolic rateqand cell mass. By absolute values, mean endogenous mass-specific metabolic rates of non-growing bacteria are similar to basal rates of eukaryote unicells, terrestrial arthropods and mammals. Maximum mass-specific metabolic rates displayed by growing bacteria are close to the record tissue-specific metabolic rates of insects, amphibia, birds and mammals. Minimum mass-specific metabolic rates of prokaryotes coincide with those of larger organisms in various energy-saving regimes: sit-and-wait strategists in arthropods, poikilotherms surviving anoxia, hibernating mammals. These observations suggest a size-independent value around which the mass-specific metabolic rates vary bounded by universal upper and lower limits in all body size intervals.