# @science on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DT5PJDMknHz
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/54107265-science-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/ca8e35554d.jpg
- **Posted:** 2026-01-24T13:00:26.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Science 🧬 (@science) — https://gondola.cc/science

## Caption

In 1999, physicist Geoffrey West and biologists Jim Brown and Brian Enquist found unexpected, interdisciplinary common ground when they set out to find how exactly animals' energy use and needs scale as they get larger or smaller. There'd been a fair amount of research into this already — in the 1930s, biologist Max Kleiber penned what's known today as "Kleiber's Law": metabolic rates scale to the three-quarter power instead of increasing at a one-to-one ratio. Basically, it means that a cat, which is 100 times larger than a mouse, does not use 100 times the energy that a mouse does. Instead, it requires 1003/4 times the energy of a mouse — and that's only about 31.6 times the mouse's requirements.⁠
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But what this trio of scientists wanted to discover was far more complex than mere metabolism rates. They wanted to find out how characteristics such as lifespan and pulse rate scaled as well. Those features didn't have the same rate as metabolism, but they clearly correlated with each other. Lifespan tended to scale to the power of one-quarter, and heart rate at the power of negative one-quarter. In other words, there's a mathematical equation that lets you predict exactly how long an animal will live and how fast its heart will beat, based on its size.⁠
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#animalkingdom #mammals #heartbeat #heart #science #biology #medicine

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## Tags

science, animalkingdom, heartbeat, heart, medicine, mammals, biology

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