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The persistent enigma of why the whole-body metabolic rate increases hypoallometrically with body mass should be solved on both the ultimate and proximate levels. The proximate mechanism may involve hyperallometric scaling of metabolically inert tissue/organ masses, hypoallometric scaling of metabolically expensive organ masses, a decrease in mass-specific metabolic rates of organs or a combination of these three factors. Although there are literature data on the tissue/organ masses scaling, they do not consider phylogenetic information. Here, we analyse the scaling of tissue/organ masses in a sample of 100 mammalian and 22 bird species with a phylogenetically informed method (PGLS) to address two questions: the role of phylogenetic differences in organ/tissue size scaling and the potential role of organ/tissue mass scaling in interspecific metabolic rate scaling. Strong phylogenetic signal was found for the brain, kidney, spleen and stomach mass in mammals but only for the brain and leg muscle in birds. Metabolically relatively inert adipose tissue scales isometrically in both groups. The masses of energetically expensive visceral organs scale hypoallometrically in mammals, with the exception of lungs, with the lowest exponent for the brain. In contrast, only brain mass scales hypoallometrically in birds, whereas other tissues and organs scale isometrically or almost isometrically. Considering that the whole-body metabolic rate scales more steeply in mammals than in birds, the mass-specific metabolic rate of visceral organs must decrease with body mass much faster in birds than in mammals. In general, studying whole-body metabolic rate is not adequate for explaining its scaling, and measuring metabolic rates of organs, together with their contribution to body mass, is urgently required.

In isopods, parental care takes the form of offspring brooding in marsupial pouches. Marsupial brooding was an important step towards the origin of terrestrial lifestyles among isopods, but its potential role in shaping isopod life histories remains unknown. It is here considered that marsupial brooding imposes costs and creates a temporary association between the survival of mothers and that of their offspring. Integrating findings from different life history models, we predicted that the effects of marsupial brooding set selective conditions for the continuation of growth after maturation, which leads to indeterminate growth, and the production of larger offspring by larger females. Based on this perspective, a study on the size dependence of offspring production in the woodlouse Porcellio scaber was performed and the generality of the results was tested by reviewing the literature on offspring production in other isopods. In P. scaber and almost all the other studied isopods, clutch size is positively related to female size. Such dependence is a necessary pre-condition for the evolution of indeterminate growth. The body mass of P. scaber differed six-fold between the largest and smallest brooding females, indicating a high potential for post-maturation growth. Our review showed that offspring size is a rarely studied trait in isopods and that it correlates negatively with offspring number but positively with female size in nearly half of the studied species. Our study of P. scaber revealed similar patterns, but the positive effect of female size on offspring size occurred only in smaller broods, and the negative relation between clutch size and offspring size occurred only in larger females. We conclude that the intraspecific patterns of offspring production in isopods agree with theoretical predictions regarding the role of offspring brooding in shaping the adaptive patterns of female investment in growth, reproduction, and the parental care provided to individual offspring.