I re-examined the scaling of metabolic rate versus body mass in eight species of ant (static allometry) to illustrate one of the ways by which contemporary concepts of metabolic allometry have been negatively impacted by the widespread use of a standardized procedure for analyzing bivariate data. The procedure in question is the one promoted by Julian Huxley in his monograph on Problems of Relative Growth , and entails back-transforming the equation for a straight line fitted to logarithmic transformations of the original observations to form a two-parameter power function on the arithmetic scale. The scaling exponents for power equations fitted to data by Huxley’s protocol were used by the original authors to evaluate predictions from a theoretical model for the evolutionary optimization of body size in animals. However, my analyses—which were based on a different philosophy and protocol for modeling bivariate data—show that observations for each of the species can be described equally well by two or more different equations with different functional form. Metabolic rate is generally higher in large individuals than in small ones, but little more can be said about metabolic allometry in ants because a clear distinction cannot be made between alternative statistical models that require very different interpretations for biological importance. Conclusions from any investigation that relies exclusively on Huxley’s analytical protocol will be based on incomplete and potentially misleading evidence.

中文翻译：

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重新思考蚂蚁的代谢异速生长

我重新检查了八种蚂蚁（静态异速生长）的代谢率与体重的比例，以说明现代代谢异速生长概念受到广泛使用的用于分析双变量数据的标准化程序产生负面影响的一种方式. 有问题的程序是朱利安赫胥黎在他的关于相对增长问题的专着中提出的程序，它需要对拟合原始观测值的对数变换的直线方程进行反向变换，以在算术上形成一个双参数幂函数规模。原始作者使用根据 Huxley 协议拟合数据的幂方程的标度指数来评估对动物体型进化优化的理论模型的预测。然而，我的分析——基于对双变量数据建模的不同哲学和协议——表明对每个物种的观察可以用两个或多个具有不同函数形式的不同方程同样好地描述。大个体的代谢率通常高于小个体，但关于蚂蚁的代谢异速生长几乎没有什么可说的，因为无法对需要对生物学重要性进行非常不同解释的替代统计模型进行明确区分。任何完全依赖 Huxley 分析方案的调查得出的结论都将基于不完整且可能具有误导性的证据。