Science News online – Life on the scales
I was just now made aware of this ground breaking theory that is coming out of metabolic ecology. This is really fascinating stuff.
“Scientists have long known that most biological rates appear to bear a simple mathematical relationship to an animal’s size: They are proportional to the animal’s mass raised to a power that is a multiple of 1/4. These relationships are known as quarter-power scaling laws. For instance, an animal’s metabolic rate appears to be proportional to mass to the 3/4 power, and its heart rate is proportional to mass to the –1/4 power.
In subsequent decades, biologists have found that the 3/4-power law appears to hold sway from microbes to whales, creatures of sizes ranging over a mind-boggling 21 orders of magnitude.
“We’ve found that despite the incredible diversity of life, from a tomato plant to an amoeba to a salmon, once you correct for size and temperature, many of these rates and times are remarkably similar,” says Gillooly.
“Metabolic rate is, in our view, the fundamental biological rate,” Gillooly says. There is a universal biological clock, he says, “but it ticks in units of energy, not units of time.
Cred to Roland who has a nice summary of the two articles linked to here.
Aaron Fulkerson 