Abstract
Body maintenance costs are often considered a proxy for performance in fitness traits. Maintenance energy requirements are measured as minimal metabolic rate of inactive, postabsorptive individuals in the laboratory. For mountain-dwelling species, translocation to the laboratory often means that they are also moved to another elevation. Due to physiological adaptations to local oxygen pressure, rapid elevational change can alter metabolic rate and translocation may result in erroneous estimates of body maintenance costs. In this study, we measured resting metabolic rate (RMR) of three populations of the Mesquite lizard (Sceloporus grammicus, Wiegmann 1828) at their native elevations (i.e., 2600, 3200 and 4100 m). Our results showed that at native elevations, mass specific RMR of lizards from the high elevation population (4100 m) did not differ from the RMR of the other populations (i.e., 2600 and 3200 m), whereas the lizards from the low elevation (2600 m) had lower RMR than those from the intermediate population. These results differ from a previous study in which the RMR of lizards from the same populations were reported to increase with native elevation when translocated and measured at an intermediate elevation. Hence, our results show that translocation in elevation can affect metabolic measures. We caution researchers that changes in elevation may preclude accurate measures of RMR in some animals and may therefore incorrectly predict performance of fitness-related traits.
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Acknowledgements
Funding for this study was provided by postdoctoral grant from Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologia (MP) and the Catedras CONACyT program (ADP, 883). We thank the Secretaría de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales for providing the collecting permits (SGPA/DGVS/007736/18). We thank Comisión Nacional de Áreas Naturales Protegidas for the facilities in the Protection Area of Flora and Fauna Nevado de Toluca and La Malinche National Park. We thank I. López for providing facilities in Apizaco. We also thank M. Martínez-Gómez for her valuable help with logistics and use of the field station at La Malinche facilities to conduct this research and V. H. Reynoso for lending equipment. We thank M. D. McCue for his valuable comments to an early version of the manuscript. Finally, we thank M. Domínguez-Godoy, R. Barrios-Montiel, R. López-Vivanco and E. Gómez-Campos for help in the field.
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Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologia, a postdoctoral grant to MP and Catedras-CONACyT program to ADP (number: 883).
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All authors conceived the study, ADP and MP performed tests and analyses, MP wrote the original draft, all authors contributed to the review and editing of the writing.
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Plasman, M., Bautista, A. & Díaz de la Vega-Pérez, A.H. Avoiding the effects of translocation on the estimates of the metabolic rates across an elevational gradient. J Comp Physiol B 192, 659–668 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00360-022-01448-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00360-022-01448-3