Time balance

The time balance for an individual organism refers to the fact that components of the behaviour have to compete for time if they exclude each other.The Dynamic Energy Budget theory for metabolic organisation makes explicit use of time, energy and mass balances..

Suppose that an organism can either search for food or process food. The consequence is that food intake must be a satiating function of food density; its maximum is contolled by the time it needs to process food. The rules behind classic enzyme kinetics and Synthesizing Units rely on the same mechanism of molecules. If an organism inserts more behavioral components, such as territorial defence, sleeping, grooming, courtship etc, and can't reduce the time to process food per food item (because that is under biochemical control), it has to allocate less time searching for food. The effect is that the maximum food intake is reduced.Not all behaviour components exclude each other.