Gas depletion timescales. Left: gas depletion time scale (t_dep) as a function of SFR. The blue (grey) circles correspond to the stacked samples of QGs for the case of solar (super solar) metallicity, assuming GDR = 92 (35). The dashed grey line and the grey shaded region depict the trend for MS galaxies from Sargent et al. (2014) with a scatter of 0.23 dex. The magenta shaded region marks the area with τ_dep < 100 Myr, typical of star-bursting galaxies. Right: gas depletion time scale as a function of redshift. The symbols are the same as in the left panel. The dashed grey line and the grey shaded region depict the trend of Liu et al. (2019) for MS galaxies at fixed M_* = 2  ×  10¹¹ M_⊙ and its corresponding scatter of 0.23 dex.