Study
Metabolic depression in animals: physiological perspectives and biochemical generalizations
Guppy, Michael; Withers, Philip
Biological Reviews, 1999
Collects measured metabolic rates from animals in hibernation, torpor, aestivation, diapause, anaerobiosis and anhydrobiosis, and asks whether the states named separately by different fields share biochemical mechanisms.
- Studied in
- Animalia
- Sample size
- review across phyla
Depressed states across very distant phyla converge on a small set of mechanisms — coordinated suppression of protein synthesis and ion pumping, reversible phosphorylation of enzymes, and a general shutdown rather than a targeted one — despite having been named and studied independently.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
Metabolic depression is better treated as one phenomenon with ecological variants than as a list of separate physiological states.
How NatureHQ reads it
The organising record for the whole dormancy family here. It is why NatureHQ presents hibernation, torpor, aestivation, diapause and cryptobiosis on one shared mechanism page and then separates them by what triggers them and how long they last, rather than as five unrelated curiosities.
- A 1999 synthesis; the molecular detail has advanced substantially, though the convergence argument has strengthened rather than weakened.
- Metabolic rates measured in different laboratories under different conditions are not perfectly comparable, which the authors discuss.
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.
Extreme survival
Living somewhere extreme usually means not experiencing the extreme. Most animals in hard places escape the worst of it — in space, in time, or by holding a mild interior — rather than enduring it.
Dormancy
Hibernation, torpor, aestivation, diapause and cryptobiosis were named separately by different fields, but underneath they run much the same machinery. What actually differs is what starts them and how long they last.
Hypoxia tolerance
Animals that survive months without oxygen do not carry a bigger store of it. They cut demand almost to nothing, protect the brain deliberately, and deal with the acid their anaerobic metabolism makes.
Hypoxia tolerance
The months-without-oxygen records belong to cold animals. The same turtle or carp at summer temperatures survives a small fraction of that — the cold is part of the mechanism, not the setting.
Published by: Wiley journalsPublished in a Wiley journal.
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