The Red Queen's hypothesis portrays evolution as a never-ending competition for expansive energy, where one species’ gain is another species’ loss. The Red Queen is neutral with respect to body size, implying that neither small nor large species have a universal competitive advantage. Here we ask whether, and if so how, the Red Queen's hypothesis really can accommodate differences in body size. The maximum population growth in ecology clearly depends on body size—the smaller the species, the shorter the generation length, and the faster it can expand given sufficient opportunity. On the other hand, large species are more efficient in energy use due to metabolic scaling and can maintain more biomass with the same energy. The advantage of shorter generation makes a wide range of body sizes competitive, yet large species do not take over. We analytically show that individuals consume energy and reproduce in physiological time, but need to compete for energy in real time. The Red Queen, through adaptive evolution of populations, balances the pressures of real and physiological time. Modeling competition for energy as a proportional prize contest from economics, we further show that Red Queen's zero-sum game can generate unimodal hat-like patterns of species rise and decline that can be neutral in relation to body size.

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所有尺码都适合红皇后

红皇后的假设将进化描述为对广阔能量的永无止境的竞争，其中一个物种的收益是另一个物种的损失。红皇后在体型方面是中性的，这意味着无论是小型物种还是大型物种都没有普遍的竞争优势。在这里，我们询问红皇后的假设是否，如果可以，如何真正适应体型的差异。生态学中的最大种群增长显然取决于体型——物种越小，世代长度越短，如果有足够的机会，它可以扩张得越快。另一方面，大型物种由于代谢缩放而在能源使用方面更有效，并且可以用相同的能量维持更多的生物量。较短世代的优势使各种体型具有竞争力，但大型物种不会接管。我们分析表明，个体在生理时间内消耗能量并繁殖，但需要实时竞争能量。红皇后通过种群的适应性进化，平衡了真实时间和生理时间的​​压力。将能源建模竞争作为经济学的比例奖竞赛，我们进一步表明，红皇后的零和博弈可以产生与体型相关的物种上升和下降的单峰帽子状模式。