specific dynamic action
- Environmental temperature alters the overall digestive energetics and differentially affects dietary protein and lipid use in a lizard
Summary: Temperature alters the class of nutrients oxidized and assimilated, and the amount of energy spent for processing a meal in an ectotherm.
- Metabolic fuel use after feeding in the zebrafish (Danio rerio): a respirometric analysis
Summary: In zebrafish, carbohydrate and lipid were the major fuels during fasting, but carbohydrate oxidation increased immediately after feeding, while protein usage predominated at later times.
- The consequences of seasonal fasting during the dormancy of tegu lizards (Salvator merianae) on their postprandial metabolic response
Summary: Long-term fasting of tegu lizards during seasonal dormancy imposes extra digestion costs for GI tract regrowth post-dormancy but this is negligible compared with the overall energetic savings from GI tract atrophy.
- Economic thermoregulatory response explains mismatch between thermal physiology and behaviour in newts
Summary: Digesting newts prefer body temperatures that are optimal for aerobic scope not in absolute terms but relative to the minimum oxygen consumption.
- Plasticity of immunity in response to eating
Summary: Aspects of immunity can increase nearly 50% during digestion of a meal in snakes; thus, immune up-regulation may contribute to the energetic cost of digestion (specific dynamic action, SDA).
- Eating increases oxidative damage in a reptile
Summary: Consuming and digesting a meal affects oxidative physiology to a surprising degree, and animals that consume large or meat-based meals may be particularly susceptible to increases in oxidative damage.
- The speed and metabolic cost of digesting a blood meal depends on temperature in a major disease vector
Summary: Respirometry reveals that higher environmental temperatures reduce the metabolic costs of digestion but hasten starvation, and behavioral measurements show that tsetse flies switch between thermal optima throughout feeding cycles.
- Digesting pythons quickly oxidize the proteins in their meals and save the lipids for later
Summary: Isotopes recovered from the exhaled CO2 of pythons fed on protein- and lipid-labeled mice indicate how and when the snakes oxidize the different types of metabolic fuels in their diet. This novel approach could be used on virtually any air-breathing animal.
- The cost of digestion in the fish-eating myotis (Myotis vivesi)
Highlighted article: With a short digestive tract and high metabolic demand, the fish-eating myotis faces confounding digestive challenges. It meets these demands with an unusually energetically intense digestive response.