Eirik Korsell <eirik at ibm.net> wrote:
>why does small animals have a higer metabolic rate per mass unit than
>large ones?
Nobody knows, despite this being one of the oldest questions in physiology.
There are many theories (but none that everyone accepts). Some of the
simpler ones relate to heat loss, which must be part of the answer (you
could fry an egg on the surface of an elephant that had the mass-specific
metabolic rate of a mouse), but they don't really appear to fully explain
the observed size-dependencies.
Many books address this question. You could look at any recent comparative
physiology textbook, or:
Schmidt-Nielsen "Scaling - why is animal size so important" Cambridge 1984
Calder "Size, function and life history" Harvard 1984
Martin Brand
Martin D. Brand
Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge
Tennis Court Road, Cambridge CB2 1QW UK
phone: +44 1223 333648, fax: +44 1223 333345
Internet: http://www.bio.cam.ac.uk/dept/biochem/brand/
