Abstract

Dynamic energy budget models are the most ambitious of resource allocation models in biology, with many practitioners claiming that they apply to all organisms with only a few changes in parameters. Because of this generality, they make very broad predictions about how organisms function. There is extensive literature on the topic, but some of the broad implications nevertheless remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we present a careful derivation of the basic version of the model from elementary biological assumptions, and we identify some of the important implications of the model for growth, starvation, maturation, and reproduction.