Fig. 3: The adaptive metabolic envelope.
All aircraft, and spacecraft, have a designed “flight envelope”, outside of which they either stop flying, or suffer severe damage. Life also has a metabolic envelope that is the result of its evolution in a particular niche. However, unlike aircraft and spacecraft, individual organisms have the advantage of a limited ability to expand the envelope to some degree when exposed to stress, known as hormesis, hence a better description is the “adaptative metabolic envelope” (AME). However the downside is without the stress, it shrinks – it seems to be very plastic. Figure created in Microsoft PowerPoint.
