Comparative Energetics of the Subterranean Ctenomys Rodents: Breaking Patterns

Subterranean mammals show lower mass-independent basal metabolic rates (BMRs). Several competing hypotheses were suggested to explain how microenvironmental conditions and underground life affect subterranean mammalian energetics. Two of these are the thermal stress and the cost-of-burrowing hypotheses. The thermal stress hypothesis posits that a lower mass-independent BMR reduces overheating in burrows where convective and evaporative heat loss is low, whereas the cost-of-burrowing hypothesis states that a lower mass-independent BMR may compensate for the high energy expenditure of digging. In this article, we assessed the relationship between BMR of Ctenomys and environmental variables through conventional statistics as well as independent contrasts. Moreover, we tested both the thermal stress and the cost-of-burrowing hypotheses at an interspecific level in a very homogeneous genus of subterranean rodents, the South American genus Ctenomys. We compared species from different geographic localities that have contrasting habitat conditions. We measured BMR through open-flow respirometry. After conventional as well as independent contrast analyses, our results support neither the thermal stress nor the cost-of-burrowing hypotheses. We observed that only body mass affects the variability in BMR. Contrasting climatic and soil conditions, habitat productivity, and net primary productivity were not correlated with BMR variability. We suggested that, because BMR and maximum metabolic rates (MMRs) are correlated, low BMRs among Ctenomys species could also be determined by factors that affect MMR rather than BMR.