The figure 1A showed that the respiration rates given for our metazoans are realistic. According to our sensitivity analysis (Appendix YY) it is the respiration that is the most sensitive into the model regarding the timing of the diapause. This parameter will be the one determining the time at which the population will exit the diapause. On the other end the excretion will be the most sensitive parameter in determining the time needed to accumulate enough lipids to survive until the next productive season. The figure 1B shows that, even though within the range of observed excretion rates, our excretion rates place themselves in the high limit of these observations. By using a fixed respiration rate we needed to calibrate the allometric relationship for the excretion rate found in our meta-analysis of the data of Danni et al. 2017. These relatively high values allowed to have realistic time spent at the surface for our metazoans. But, since we used allometric relationship, the species that can have a realistic diapause pattern can only be found within a narrow size window (bigger than 1000 µm but smaller the 2000 µm). That is the reason why our biggest metazoan species of 2400 µm does not exhibit a regular pattern (not shown).