Response to ‘On the importance of understanding physiology when estimating energetics in cetaceans’

Abstract

We are grateful for the interest in our paper by two eminent physiologists and hope this response to their comments will clarify the objectives of our paper. The analysis in Fahlman et al. (2016) was not intended to provide an accurate method to estimate field metabolic rate (FMR) in large mysticetes; the objective was to measure the dynamic changes in physiology associated with recovery from exercise and show that they are important to consider when estimating FMR. While static averages can provide useful estimates of FMR for a variety of situations, these need to be appropriately selected. For example, we illustrate that it is not possible to use selected average values chosen from excised tissues or resting animals (as in Blix and Folkow, 1995) to provide meaningful estimates of FMR for animals at different activities (i.e. the dolphins in our study). Our study highlights the importance of temporal variation in physiological models: the Blix and Folkow (1995) estimates rely on the assumption that only breathing frequency (fR) changes with activity, while we argue that both the tidal volume (VT) and mixed lung O2 content also vary with activity and recovery from a dive (Ridgway et al., 1969). Including this variation in all three parameters reduces temporal uncertainty in the same conceptual model (see Eqn. 1 in Fahlman et al., 2016).