Biological Rhythms: Mechanisms and Adaptive Values

Temporal order is crucial for all living beings. They have to accomplish manifold and recurring tasks, that are often mutually exclusive. Moreover, those tasks have to be fulfilled at the right time, in tune with periodic fluctuations in the environment. Biological rhythms play an important part in the temporal organization of behaviour and physiology. These rhythms persist in constant conditions in the laboratory, and are thus not simply caused by environmental cycles: they are endogenous, generated by the organism itself. In this chapter I will discuss two time concepts applied to biological rhythms: that of ‘objective time’, related to environmental cycles and applicable in ‘circa-rhythms’, and that of subjective or ‘physiological time’, related to energy turnover and reflected in body- size dependent, ‘non circarhythms’. I will furthermore outline two complementary aspects, function and causation of biological rhythms. Generalizations will be illustrated by examples from various, mainly vertebrate taxa.

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