I Like Big Mass and I Can Not Lie: Does Mass of Ectotherm Affect Amounts of Carbon Dioxide Produced?

Abstract

Body shape, size, food availability, and temperature are all factors that may affect metabolic rates (French 2016). We chose to see what the correlation between size of the ectotherms and the metabolic activity was. We predicted that as size increases so will metabolic rates. The way we measured size was through weight in grams. We measured the change in CO2 to account for rates of metabolism. We chose this because carbon dioxide is a byproduct of metabolism, directly reflecting rates of metabolism. Although we had predicted that as weight increases so would metabolic activity, our results were unsupported. Our results showed that as weight decreased, the rate of change in CO2 increases. This means that the smaller the ectotherm, the higher its metabolic rates will be. If the mass of an ectotherm is larger than another, the metabolic rate will not be as high as the smaller of the two.