Sweat the small stuff: A review of the use of accelerometers to estimate energy expenditure in wild animals
Abstract
Abstract Dynamic body acceleration (DBA), a measure of work based on Newtonian biomechanics, is a metric often used to estimate daily energy expenditure (DEE) with accelerometers, but studies validating DBA in wild animals have shown mixed results. I review all studies using accelerometry to measure energy expenditure in free‐living (wild or farmed) animals, focussing on those that calibrate DBA against doubly labelled water or heart rate as the ‘gold standard’ for DEE. Most (~90%) energetics studies using DBA focus on endotherms, even though DBA may work better for ectotherms. In nearly all studies of endotherms, average DBA increased linearly with DEE, but the intercept of the DBA‐DEE relationship was not constant across contexts—even within the same species. DBA‐DEE relationships were stronger with mass‐specific DEE and slightly stronger with vectorial DBA than overall DBA. In a case study of six seabird species with similar activity modes and physiologies, DBA‐DEE slopes varied with activity, but were consistent across species for flight, implying that activity‐specific slopes might be applied across species in some cases where sufficient sampling occurs within similar taxa. I offer recommendations for the use of DBA to estimate DEE. I explore the potential for a general physiological model across species, without species‐specific calibrations, and note where the DBA‐DEE relationship breaks down and where we need more data. DBA, used under appropriate conditions, is an…
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