Fig. 1.

Conceptual plots for allometric relationships. a Three different types of allometric relationships between food intake (a focal trait; on the y axis) and size (on the x axis) with different exponents, b, and a fixed slope, a (Eq. 1); note that when b = 1, the relationship is linear. b When b is close to 1 (b = 0.9), the relationship becomes nearly linear without log-transformation (dotted line). c, d Even when b is not close to 1 (b = 0.5), whether the relationship is non-linear depends on how the data are distributed; the non-linear relationship in d could be much better approximated by a linear line than that in c. e, f Notably, the same slopes (b = 0.5) can be estimated as having different slopes if not log-transformed due to having different values for a, as in e, or being on different parts of a non-linear curve, as in f