One of the most significant energy demands that a female animal will face at any time in her life is when she is feeding her young. Unlike the intense bursts of energy that we routinely expend in daily life, lactation is a sustained demand that lasts over an extensive period of time. An important question is what limits an animal’s capacity to output energy, for example in the form of milk production? Is this capacity intrinsically limited by the amount of energy that the animal can absorb across the gut lining (e.g. centrally limited), or, is it limited by the organ that is responsible for the energy output, in this case the mammary gland (peripherally limited). This debate raged for several years, and some had thought that it had been laid to rest primarily by the work of Kimberly Hammond and Jared Diamond. In the early 1990s, they described experiments...

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