A new mechanistic model for individual growth suggests upregulated maintenance costs when food is scarce in an insect

A growing animal ingests food from the environment and distributes the assimilated energy between chemical energy stored in synthesized biomass and energy spent on metabolic processes, including food processing, maintenance, activity and overhead costs for growth. Under food restriction, the growth rate is usually decreased. However, the extent of this reduction may be influenced by a potential trade-off with maintenance metabolism. The latter seems to be down-regulated under food restriction in some animals and up-regulated in others. Recently, the Maintenance-Growth Model (MGM) was developed for ontogenetic and post-mature growth, including several aspects not considered by common mechanistic growth models, most importantly the division of maintenance costs into non-negotiable and negotiable parts, where the latter can be up- or downregulated under food restriction. Using empirical data, MGM has been calibrated and successfully applied to an insect growing under ad libitum conditions. Here, the model is further calibrated to newly collected individual data for the same species growing under two different regimes of food restriction, complemented with previously collected data for food-limited cohorts. We find that two alternative model scenarios of MGM are able to generate rather good predictions of observed growth under food restriction, assuming either upregulated maintenance or decreased effective assimilation (assimilation minus energy spent on processing and searching food). We find the latter scenario least plausible, implying that the current study provides the first indication for the occurrence of upregulated maintenance in an insect species when food is scarce, an unexpected result that requires further investigation. The inclusion of maintenance regulation in MGM enables the new growth model to be used in the modelling of life-history dependent trade-offs between maintenance, growth and maturation for various other species.