Meeting Abstract

P3.118  Friday, Jan. 6  Allometric scaling of development time in insects FRAZIER, M.R.; DILLON, M.E.*; U.S. EPA, Western Ecology Division, Newport, OR; University of Wyoming, Laramie Michael.Dillon@uwyo.edu

Development time is a fundamental life-history trait with broad organismal, ecological, and evolutionary implications. Insects dominate the terrestrial biosphere, and their ecological and economic importance has prompted the collection of a great deal of developmental data for many species. Despite this abundance of data, there have been few synthetic efforts to characterize how insect development time scales with body size. As such, insects provide an ideal opportunity to test some historical allometric scaling assumptions. We gathered literature estimates of egg to adult development time as a function of temperature for 357 insect species from 16 insect orders. From these data, we estimated minimum development time (regardless of the temperature at which it occurred) and body size (from the literature or via personal communication) for each species. Preliminary analyses suggest that development time scales with body mass to the 0.16, excluding the historically assumed 1/4 power scaling. Further, the scaling exponent is invariant among insect orders but the intercept varies significantly, such that some insects develop more quickly at the same body size. These initial results suggest that life history and macroecological models that assume 1/4 power scaling of development time will tend to overestimate the costs of delaying development to obtain larger body sizes.