Meeting Abstract
58.1 Saturday, Jan. 5 Lazy Squid: Scaling of anaerobic metabolism and feeding ecology in Dosidicus gigas TRUEBLOOD, LA*; SEIBEL, BA; University of Rhode Island; University of Rhode Island truell@mail.uri.edu
Mass-specific rates of aerobic metabolism (B) typically decline with increasing body mass (M) according to B= b0Mb, where b0 is a normalization constant independent of mass and b is a scaling coefficient. In contrast to the inverse relationship between mass-specific aerobic metabolism and body mass, anaerobic metabolic potential typically scales positively with body mass. This study examines metabolism in an oceanic squid, Dosidicus gigas (Family: Ommastrephidae), which spans six orders of magnitude in body mass. We demonstrate that anaerobic metabolism in this species scales negatively to body mass. We hypothesize that the continued reliance on small prey in adulthood, despite the predator’s large adult size, requires a reduced reliance on anaerobically fueled burst activity at large, relative to small, sizes. This contrasts with many fishes that require increased metabolic capacity to fuel constant length-specific burst swimming speeds across their size range and typically display positive scaling of anaerobically-poised enzymes.
