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Allometric scaling is any change that deviates from isometry. A classic example discussed by Galileo in his Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences is the skeleton of mammals. The skeletal structure becomes much stronger and more robust relative to the size of the body as the body size increases. [13]
Through extensive research on various animals' metabolic rates, he found that a 3/4 power scaling provided a better fit to the empirical data than the 2/3 power. [2] His findings provided the groundwork for understanding allometric scaling laws in biology, leading to the formulation of the Metabolic Scaling Theory and the later work by West ...
Allometric engineering is the process of experimentally shifting the scaling relationships, for body size or shape, in a population of organisms. More specifically, the process of experimentally breaking the tight covariance evident among component traits of a complex phenotype by altering the variance of one trait relative to another.
[5] Consequently, most animals show allometric scaling with increased size, both among species and within a species. The giant creatures seen in monster movies (e.g., Godzilla , King Kong , and Them! , and other kaiju ) are also unrealistic, given that their sheer size would force them to collapse.
Various authors have proposed at least eight different types of mechanisms that predict an allometric scaling exponent of either 2 ⁄ 3 or 3 ⁄ 4. The majority view is that while the 3 ⁄ 4 exponent is indeed the mean observed exponent within and across taxa, there is intra- and interspecific variability in the exponent that can include ...
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The principle relies on the allometric (non-linear) scaling of size and energy requirement. The metabolic rate per unit of body mass of large animals is slow enough to subside on a consistent flow of low-quality food. [1] However, in small animals, the rate is higher and they cannot draw sufficient energy from low-quality food to live on. [1]
There is an allometric scaling relationship between the body mass of Lepidoptera and length of the proboscis [33] from which an interesting adaptive departure is the unusually long-tongued hawk moth Xanthopan morganii praedicta.