© 2001 by The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology
Modeling the Metabolic Energetics of Brief and Intermittent Locomotion in Lizards and Rodents1
1 Section of Integrative Physiology and Neurobiology, Environmental, Population, and Organismic Biology, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309-0334
| SYNOPSIS |
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When locomotor activity is brief, physiological steady state conditions are not attained. It is therefore difficult to model the energetic costs of intermittent activity using standard methods. This difficulty is addressed by considering as reflective of the metabolic costs of activity not only the oxygen consumed during the activity itself, but also the excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC) and any excess metabolites persisting at the end of EPOC. This paper briefly reviews the metabolic events associated with EPOC, and then examines how this approach can be applied to address questions of how behavioral variables associated with locomotion (activity duration, intensity, frequency) can influence the energetic costs to the animal per unit distance. Using data for lizards, mice, and others, EPOC can be shown to be the major component of energetic costs when durations are short, regardless of exercise intensity. Brief activity is much more expensive by this measure than is steady state locomotion, regardless of phylogeny or body mass. Three studies of intermittent locomotion provide evidence that brief behaviors can be undertaken at lower metabolic costs than predicted from single bouts of activity when repeated in a frequent, repeated pattern. Metabolic savings appear greatest when the pause period between behaviors is short relative to EPOC duration, the time for organismal metabolic rate to return to pre-exercise levels, although longer pause periods may increase endurance.
| INTRODUCTION |
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Estimating the metabolic costs of animal locomotor activities has been an active area of integrative biology for 25 yr. Most efforts derive from measurements of aerobic metabolism while animals are locomoting under steady state conditions, conditions which lend themselves well to laboratory measurement but often fall short in modeling animal behaviors that are intermittent or brief in duration. Intermittent locomotion is often characterized as behavior that is brief, sometimes strenuous, and repeated at frequent intervals. Examples include territorial defense and foraging behavior of many lizards (Huey and Pianka, 1981
| DEFINING THE COST OF ACTIVITY, CACT |
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Whereas traditional estimates of locomotor costs (Cost of transport, cost of locomotion, Mrun, Cmin, etc.) have considered the costs incurred during locomotion as a function of distance covered (Taylor et al., 1970
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Inclusion of the excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC, sensu Gaesser and Brooks, 1984
9x the EEOC volume when activity is 60 sec or less in duration (Baker and Gleeson, 1998
Metabolic costs of activity reflected in the EPOC volume component vary depending upon species and activity level. High energy phosphate resynthesis, replenishment of oxygen stores, metabolite removal and re-cycling, regulated gene expression, and hormonal stimulation are all thought to contribute to the EPOC volume. Several recent accountings of EPOC components that contribute to EPOC in mammals can be found (Gaesser and Brooks, 1984
; Bahr, 1992
; Fitts, 1994
; Neufer, 1999
). For purposes of this article, it matters not so much how each of the specific components of EPOC contribute to total costs as does the recognition that those costs, such as phosphocreatine resynthesis for example, are legitimate energetic expenses incurred by the animal because of its activity. To the extent that these expenses are reflected in the oxidative metabolism of the animal, they are accounted for by including EPOC in an energetic assessment. Only if activity-induced metabolite accumulations or depressions are not remedied during the period of time defined by the EPOC duration is an additional computation required. Most EPOC durations are long relative to the time period generally ascribed to phosphagen replenishment (EPOC duration = 719 min in small rodents, Baker and Gleeson, 1998, 1999
; Hatta et al., 1994; 15120 min in lizards; Gleeson, 1979; Wagner and Gleeson, 1996
; Hancock et al., 2001
). The relatively long period covered by EPOC measurement leaves residual lactate accumulation as the most common source of additional costs not reflected in EPOC, and then generally only in ectotherms where lactate removal rates are long relative to endotherms (Gleeson, 1991, 1996
).
Thus the cost of activity (Cact, energy expended per unit distance traveled) can be expressed as
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Where EEOC and EPOC represent the energetic equivalence of the mass-specific oxygen consumption elevated above resting levels during exercise and post-exercise, respectively,
[X] represents the energetic contribution reflected in any difference in concentration of metabolite X between the pre-exercise state and the state of the animal at the end of EPOC, and distance traveled is the distance moved during the locomotor behavior under consideration. Cost of activity can have different units of energy utilization and distance (kcals/g/m, kJ/g/km, etc.), however the more familiar term cost of locomotion is generally expressed as mls O2/g/km, and that convention is continued here.
Duration and intensity of activity can influence Cact. Cost of activity is highest at the shortest activity durations, and decreases logarithmically as the activity duration increases. At very short activity durations in lizards (515 sec), costs can be 47 times more expensive than predicted from traditional steady state approaches (Hancock et al., 2001
). In mice the costs may be 60200 times sustained locomotor costs when durations are 515 sec (Baker and Gleeson, 1998
). Preliminary data from mammals ranging from mice to horses (Keng et al., 1999
; unpublished data) support this general finding that short duration activity is relatively costly per unit distance. Figure 2 summarizes the relationship between cost and duration for lab mice.
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In most cases the intensity of locomotor activity, that is, how fast an animal locomotes, has no significant effect on Cact when duration is held constant. The exception may be in mice. In laboratory mice when activity durations are brief (1560 sec) and intensity low (25100% of maximal aerobic speed), there is no real change in excess oxygen consumption as running intensity increases (Baker and Gleeson, 1999
In summary, the inclusion of all metabolic costs into an analysis of locomotor activities suggests that activities that are short in duration are costly per unit distance relative to estimates based on continuous locomotion. The energetic analysis of single bouts of brief activity such as those summarized above would predict that the cost of repeated brief activity would be extraordinarily high. For example, Kenagy and Hoyt (1989)
report data which suggest that golden-mantled ground squirrels run (for periods of 15 sec or less) approximately 6.5 times per day. This intermittent behavior is compressed into a two hour activity period. A conservative, mass corrected, extrapolation of the data from mice (Baker and Gleeson, 1998
) to squirrels predicts an energetic cost equivalent to three times the estimated daily energy expenditure of the squirrel (Kenagy and Hoyt, 1989
). Clearly, costs of this magnitude cannot be possible. As this simple example illustrates, intermittently performed behavior must be performed at lower costs than those predicted from single bouts of similar activity. The remainder of this paper summarizes three studies that address this apparent economy associated with intermittent locomotion.
| COSTS OF INTERMITTENT ACTIVITY: THREE EXAMPLES |
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To test whether or not the number of repeated bouts would influence energetic costs, Edwards recently conducted an experiment with mice forced to run maximally for 15 sec either once, twice, 3, 5, 9 or 13 times within a 6.25 min period, after which the animals were allowed to recover fully (Edwards and Gleeson, 2001
O2 were measured throughout each experiment. She found that although animals ran farther as the number of bouts increased, the total metabolic cost, represented by the sum of EEOCs and the EPOCs of the inter-bout and the final recovery periods, actually remained unchanged. As a result metabolic expenditure per unit distance traveled declined. Energetically, the costs were very similar to the costs incurred by mice running the same distances in single bouts of longer duration (Baker and Gleeson, 1998
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A second example comes from a laboratory experiment that modeled the intermittent field behavior of foraging prairie voles. Voles of the genus Microtus exhibit a characteristic foraging behavior whereby they intersperse periods of intermittent locomotor behavior with periods of quiescence (Madison, 1985
O2 of the voles engaged in intermittent activity is significantly less than predicted from the
O2 associated with a solitary bout of 5 sec activity (paired t = 2.42, P = 0.03). This observation has also been reported in lizards (Scholnick and Gleeson, 2000
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The third example compares the impact of intermittent locomotion on both endurance characteristics and Cact in the lizard Dipsosaurus dorsalis. This example builds on the work of Randi Weinstein and Bob Full who have shown that intermittent locomotor behavior of different run-pause intervals influences the locomotor endurance of both crabs (Weinstein and Full, 1992
30%) in endurance (data not shown). In contrast, when lizards were run for only 5 sec durations and pause duration was increased, increases in endurance of
300% were measured (Fig. 5). It is probably not coincidental that the average run duration of Dipsosaurus in the field is approximately 5 sec (Hancock et al., 2001
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As was found with the mice and voles, six repeated bouts of 5 sec duration in lizards resulted in lower overall activity costs (3.55 ml O2/g/km depending upon run-pause ratio) than predicted from a single bout of 5 sec activity at the same intensity (
6.4 ml O2/g/km; Hancock and Gleeson, unpublished data), and like the mice Cact was not different than that predicted from a single 30 sec period of exercise at the same intensity followed by recovery. This finding in an ectotherm suggests that the conclusion reached earlier from studies of mice, namely that intermittent activity characterized by short pause periods may be no more costly to an animal than when the animal conducts the locomotor behavior as a single, longer bout, is a general characteristic of behavioral energetics. | SUMMARY |
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The data indicate that the metabolic cost of brief (
60 sec) locomotor activities is significantly more costly per unit distance traveled to animals than are costs estimated from steady state locomotion. The high cost of activity (Cact) is dominated by the costs reflected in the excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC) that immediately follows a burst of activity. The cost of activity is sensitive to activity duration, being highest at the shortest durations, but is relatively insensitive to activity intensity in most animals. Although the high Cact for single periods of brief activity would suggest that intermittently repeated behavior would be prohibitively expensive, the data from mice, voles, and lizards indicate otherwise. Both rodents and lizards demonstrate an economy of intermittent locomotion that suggests that it may often be no more expensive to travel between points A and B in a series of frequently repeated bursts of locomotion than it is to travel the entire distance as a single event. This is particularly true when the pause period between activity periods is short relative to the length of time required for post-exercise oxygen consumption to return to pre-exercise levels. Longer pause periods may result in greater costs of activity, but may afford the animal greater endurance capacity. We currently lack data that can explain the physiologic explanation for why intermittent locomotion is less expensive than predicted from single bouts of activity, and this is worthy of study. The data from horses and rodents and from a reptile also suggest that there are allometric and phylogenetic differences to the response to brief activity that merit further evaluation so that these data may be interpreted more generally and applied in a more behavioral context.
| ACKNOWLEDGMENTS |
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We thank Dr. Randi Weinstein, Kelly Kirlin, and Dr. Carlos Crocker for their significant contributions to the design, conduct, or interpretation of some of the work discussed, and we thank Emily Baker for sharing her unpublished data. We also thank Dr. Bruce Wunder for assistance in obtaining M. ochragaster and directing us to the appropriate literature on their ecology. Supported by NSF 97240140.
| FOOTNOTES |
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1 From the Symposium Intermittent Locomotion: Integrating the Physiology, Biomechanics and Behavior of Repeated Activity presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, 48 January 2000, at Atlanta, Georgia.
2 E-mail: gleeson{at}colorado.edu ![]()
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