What is ontogenetic allometry?
What is ontogenetic allometry?
Ontogenetic allometry refers to shape changes with ontogenetic stage or age. This is the most important type of allometry for most studies of development. Static allometry refers to the shape correlates of size independently of age. Evolutionary allometry refers to the shape correlates of size among species.
What does allometry mean in biology?
Biological Scaling
Allometry, in its broadest sense, describes how the characteristics of living creatures change with size. The term originally referred to the scaling relationship between the size of a body part and the size of the body as a whole, as both grow during development.
How do you calculate allometry?
Allometric equations take the general form Y = aMb, where Y is some biological variable, M is a measure of body size, and b is some scaling exponent. In allometry, equations are often presented in logarithmic form so that a diverse range of body sizes can be plotted on a single graph.
What animals grow Isometrically?
Examples of organisms that grow isometrically:
- Batrachoseps, a type of salamander.
- zebra fish.
How is Allometry involved in evolution?
Allometry is an important method for describing morphological evolution. It is the relation between the size of an organism and the size of any of its parts: for example, there is an allometric relation between brain size and body size, such that (in this case) animals with bigger bodies have bigger brains.
Why is the study of Allometry important in meat animals?
To estimate meat yield in live animals it is necessary to visualize the muscle mass beneath the animal’s outward shape. Body regions where subcutaneous fat is scarce, and where muscle mass may be judged by the stance between the limbs are, therefore, particularly important in the judgement of live meat animals.
Which of the following is an example of an allometric relationship?
A well known example of an allometric relationship is skeletal mass and body mass. Specifically, the skeleton of a larger organism will be relatively heavier than that of a smaller organism.
Do animals scale up Isometrically?
However, during ontogeny, the metabolic rate of pelagic (open-water) animals often scales isometrically (in a 1:1 proportion) with body mass. This is a robust pattern, occurring in five different phyla. To maintain a constant body temperature, metabolic heat production would also have to scale as M2/3.
How is Allometry important to the meat animal?
Allometry is the study and measurement of relative growth. Why is relative growth important in animal agriculture? Different breeds may have different shapes, and animal shapes are determined by differences in relative growth. Relative growth helps explain the evolution and selective breeding of our meat animals.
Is human growth allometric?
Humans are a good example of a species that undergoes allometric growth. The head, limbs, and body grow at different rates, resulting in a human adult with proportions completely different from those of the newborn baby: .
Is Human growth allometric?
Do humans grow Isometrically?
In isometric growth, organs grow at the same rate as the body growth. So, this is the key difference between allometric and isometric growth. Human growth is an example of allometric growth while salamander growth is an example of isometric growth.
What is ontogenetic allometry and evolutionary allometry?
Ontogenetic allometry refers to shape changes with ontogenetic stage or age. This is the most important type of allometry for most studies of development. Static allometry refers to the shape correlates of size independently of age. Evolutionary allometry refers to the shape correlates of size among species.
What are the different types of allometry?
Allometry is often divided into ontogenetic, static, or evolutionary ( Klingenberg & Zimmermann, 1992 ). Ontogenetic allometry refers to shape changes with ontogenetic stage or age. This is the most important type of allometry for most studies of development.
Why is allometry important in genomics?
Allometry can complicate comparisons among genotypes or treatments when they vary in size as well as shape. In such cases, it can be necessary to determine what the static allometric shape variation is independent of the treatment or mutation of interest.
What is allometric variation in traits?
Traits are said to exhibit allometric variation when they do not scale isometrically to some measure of size (Gould, 1966). Shape and size are inextricably linked in most organisms. Allometry is also a prominent feature of shape variation for complex morphological traits such as craniofacial shape (Fig. 10A).
