Meeting Abstract

1.3  Friday, Jan. 4  Research paradigms in nutritional ecology inspired by Ken Nagy KARASOV, WH; Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison wkarasov@wisc.edu

Although the majority of Ken Nagy’s work focused mainly on energy expenditure in free-living vertebrates, more than 20% of his journal publications were concerned with nutritional ecology. His highly empirical studies involving detailed budgets of energy, mass, and specific elements and nutrients advanced knowledge about topics such as the cost of growth, the digestibility of foods of wild vertebrates, the mechanistic bases for observed digestibilities, and the nutritional qualities of whole diets. A hallmark of the work was the way it was integrated with the ecological and sometimes evolutionary contexts of the animals he studied, resulting in in-depth understanding of the nutritional ecology of diverse organisms such as ectothermic and endothermic desert herbivores, marine iguanas, and tropical howler monkeys. I will elaborate on how the work was also foundational for development of new tools and research directions in ecology. For example, the water economy index (ratio of water influx to field metabolic rate) became a new tool to indicate the likelihood of surviving without supplemental water. The estimates of the ecological cost of growth can advance models of growth in the emerging field of metabolic ecology. The budgeting approach lent itself to the subsequent integration of how natural toxins and contaminants relate to animal energetics and nutritional ecology.