Journal
ECOLOGY LETTERS
Volume 23, Issue 4, Pages 642-652Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/ele.13464
Keywords
BMR; demography; life history; lifespan; metabolism; pace of life; physiology; rate of living; RMR; senescence
Categories
Funding
- National Geographic Society [9875-16]
- National Science Foundation [DEB-1241041, DEB-1651283, IOS-1656120, IOS-1122228]
- AOU Graduate Student Research Grant
- Wesley M. Dixon Memorial Fellowship
- University of Montana IACUC protocol [059-10TMMCWRU]
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Survival rates vary dramatically among species and predictably across latitudes, but causes of this variation are unclear. The rate-of-living hypothesis posits that physiological damage from metabolism causes species with faster metabolic rates to exhibit lower survival rates. However, whether increased survival commonly observed in tropical and south temperate latitudes is associated with slower metabolic rate remains unclear. We compared metabolic rates and annual survival rates that we measured across 46 species, and from literature data across 147 species of birds in northern, southern and tropical latitudes. High metabolic rates were associated with lower survival but survival varied substantially among latitudinal regions independent of metabolism. The inability of metabolic rate to explain latitudinal variation in survival suggests (1) species may evolve physiological mechanisms that mitigate physiological damage from cellular metabolism and (2) extrinsic rather than intrinsic sources of mortality are the primary causes of latitudinal differences in survival.
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