| dc.description.abstract | Living organisms are metabolically active throughout their lives; they take up resources from
their environment, convert these resources into useful materials and get rid of wastes. The
sum of these reactions and processes is called metabolic activity and we can express its
speed by the metabolic rate. Species of various kind exhibit great variability in metabolic
rate, regarding both its lifetime mean value and its seasonal changes. Metabolic rate
is an important factor in population dynamics, because, by multiplicatively influencing
the magnitude of the growth rate, it determines how much an individual experiences
the favourable or unfavourable environmental conditions. Considering evolutionary
competition, the optimal seasonal metabolic pattern is inevitably a ected by the amount
of resources and the environmental temperature. This raises the question that, under given
environmental conditions in a seasonally changing environment, what the evolutionarily
stable metabolic pattern is. To examine this question we used the resource-consumer model of MacArthur as a starting point. | |
