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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]
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.
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Kleiber's law, like many other biological allometric laws, is a consequence of the physics and/or geometry of circulatory systems in biology. [5] Max Kleiber first discovered the law when analyzing a large number of independent studies on respiration within individual species. [2]
(1) Scaling in Biology – Enquist is notable in biology for his work with Geoffrey West and James H. Brown, in understanding the origin and diversity of organismal form, function, and diversity by developing general models for the origin of allometry and scaling laws in biology.
Allometry studies the relative size of organs or parts of organisms. Tree allometry narrows the definition to applications involving measurements of the growth or size of trees. Allometric relationships often are used to estimate difficult tree measurements, such as volume, from an easily measured attribute such as diameter at breast height (DBH).
The distributions of a wide variety of physical, biological, and human-made phenomena approximately follow a power law over a wide range of magnitudes: these include the sizes of craters on the moon and of solar flares, [2] cloud sizes, [3] the foraging pattern of various species, [4] the sizes of activity patterns of neuronal populations, [5] the frequencies of words in most languages ...
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]