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Kleiber's Law
Kleiber's law, named after Max Kleiber for his biology work in the early 1930s, is the observation that, for the vast majority of animals, an animal's basal metabolic rate, metabolic rate scales to the power of the animal's mass. Symbolically: if is the animal's metabolic rate, and is the animal's mass, then Kleiber's law states that . Thus, over the same time span, a cat having a mass 100 times that of a mouse will consume only about 32 times the energy the mouse uses. The exact value of the exponent in Kleiber's law is unclear, in part because the law currently lacks a single theoretical explanation that is ''entirely'' satisfactory. image:Kleiber1947.svg, 400px, Kleiber's plot comparing body size to metabolic rate for a variety of species. Proposed explanations for the law Kleiber's law, as many other biological allometric laws, is a consequence of the physics and/or geometry of animal circulatory systems. Max Kleiber first discovered the law when analyzing a large nu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Max Kleiber
Max Kleiber (4 January 1893 – 5 January 1976) was a Swiss agricultural biologist, born and educated in Zurich, Switzerland. Kleiber graduated from the as an Agricultural Chemist in 1920, earned the ScD degree in 1924, and became a private '''' after publishing his thesis ''The Energy Concept in the Science of Nutrition''. Kleiber joined the Animal Husbandry Department of |