This reminds me of an old (1928) piece titled "On Being The Right Size" by JBS Haldane [0], which lightly touches on many different concerns related to sizing:<p>> Of course tall land animals have other difficulties. They have to pump their blood to greater heights than a man, and, therefore, require a larger blood pressure and tougher blood-vessels. A great many men die from burst arteries, greater for an elephant or a giraffe.<p><a href="https://irl.cs.ucla.edu/papers/right-size.html" rel="nofollow">https://irl.cs.ucla.edu/papers/right-size.html</a>
I'm confused by the slider task. The explanation simply says that voles eat much more than elephants <i>per unit of body mass</i>, but the sliders suggest that voles literally eat more food per day than elephants.<p>Are the grass pictures supposed to be interpreted relative to the size of the animals next to them?
> 402<p>> Plot twist!<p>> Payment required...<p>> This embedded plot has reached the maximum allowable views given the owner's current subscription.<p>> Please visit the subscriptions page to learn more about upgrading.<p>Don't see many 402s!<p>Also, D3 is awesome. Don't pay to show a graph, either draw it in any visualization tool and take a screenshot for the article, or use locally hosted D3.
Here's another fun read on why sizes matter as it relates to monster movies<p><a href="http://fathom.lib.uchicago.edu/2/21701757/" rel="nofollow">http://fathom.lib.uchicago.edu/2/21701757/</a>
I visited San Diego Zoo a few months ago. In SDZ's Safari park, they host one of the biggest elephant park in North America. I remember the tour guide mentioned Elephants are so huge that if you lay down for more than 4 hours, there are pretty high chance they won't stand up and eventually leading to death due to the size of their body.
This article is interesting, but all it talks about is why big animals have a lower metabolic rate than small ones. I wish it would have also addressed the question of why small animals have a higher metabolic rate than big ones. If elephants can get away with having such a low metabolic rate, why can't voles?
I thought this would be about allometric scaling of organs. But if we're on the topic of metabolism, I wonder what the rate of cancer is for shrews vs. elephants, once the metabolism and lifespan are somehow accounted for.
Geoffrey West's book Scale gets into this -- good read.<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Scale-Universal-Innovation-Sustainability-Organisms/dp/1594205582/" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Scale-Universal-Innovation-Sustainabi...</a>
Also, at the cell level, large animals should have a better self-protecting mechanism against cancer, because more cells means a higher probability of cell-divisions going awry.
The difference in metabolic rates between large and small animals is directly linked to why large animals typically have longer lifespans the smaller ones.
Since the embedded plot isn't showing up, you can see it at <a href="https://plot.ly/~aatish/115/an-ounce-of-a-smaller-creature-gulps-more-air-than-an-ounce-of-a-bigger-creature/" rel="nofollow">https://plot.ly/~aatish/115/an-ounce-of-a-smaller-creature-g...</a>
Knut Schmidt-Nielsen wrote a couple of books on this topic. Googling Bonner and Schmidt-Nielsen together seems to bring up some surveys of the literature.