Long-term experimental evolution decouples size and production costs in Escherichia coli

Abstract

AbstractBody size covaries with population dynamics across life’s domains. Theory holds that metabolism imposes fundamental constraints on the coevolution of size and demography. However, studies of interspecific patterns are confounded by other factors that covary with size and demography, and experimental tests of the causal links remain elusive. Here we leverage a 60,000-generation experiment in which Escherichia coli populations evolved larger cells to examine intraspecific metabolic scaling and correlations with demographic parameters. Metabolic theory successfully predicted the relations among size, metabolism, and maximum population density, with strong support for Damuth’s law of energy equivalence in this experiment. In contrast, populations of larger cells grew faster than those of smaller cells, contradicting the fundamental assumption that costs of production should increase proportionately with size. The finding that the costs of production are substantially decoupled from size requires re-examining the evolutionary drivers and ecological consequences of biological size more generally.