Data Science for SAFS

A new undergraduate course with a focus on R - no experience required

Creative Commons License

Course Dev Info

Graphing

Mass vs Metabolism


The relationship between the body size of an organism and its metabolic rate is one of the most well studied and still most controversial areas of organismal physiology. We want to graph this relationship in the Artiodactyla using a subset of data from a large compilation of body size data (Savage et al. 2004). You can copy and paste this data frame into your program:

size_mr_data <- data.frame(
  body_mass = c(32000, 37800, 347000, 4200, 196500, 100000, 4290, 
    32000, 65000, 69125, 9600, 133300, 150000, 407000, 115000, 
    67000,325000, 21500, 58588, 65320, 85000, 135000, 20500, 1613,
    1618),
  metabolic_rate = c(49.984, 51.981, 306.770, 10.075, 230.073, 
    148.949, 11.966, 46.414, 123.287, 106.663, 20.619, 180.150, 
    200.830, 224.779, 148.940, 112.430, 286.847, 46.347, 142.863, 
    106.670, 119.660, 104.150, 33.165, 4.900, 4.865))

Now make two plots with appropriate axis labels:

  1. A graph of body mass vs. metabolic rate
  2. A graph of body mass vs. metabolic rate, with logarithmically scaled axes (this stretches the axis, but keeps the numbers on the original scale), and the point size set to 5.

Think about what the shape of these graphs tells you about the form of the relationship between mass and metabolic rate.

[click here for output] [click here for output]