Kleiber's law

Kleiber's law, named after Max Kleiber's biological work in the early 1930s, is the observation that, for the vast majority of animals, an animal's metabolic rate scales to the 3/4 power of the animal's mass. Thus a cat, having a mass 100 times that of a mouse, will have a metabolism roughly 31 times greater than that of a mouse.

Kleiber's law, as many other biological allometric laws, appears to be a consequence of the physics and geometry of animal circulatory systems.

See Also

• power law
• allometric law
• scaling law
• constructal law

External links

• Wang Z, O'Connor TP, Heshka S, Heymsfield SB. The reconstruction of Kleiber's law at the organ-tissue level. J Nutr. 2001 Nov;131(11):2967–70.
• Rau AR. Biological scaling and physics. J Biosci. 2002 Sep;27(5):475–8.
• Of Mice and Elephants
• New Clues to Why Size Equals Destiny