What is Kleiber’s law?
In the 1930s the Swiss born biologist Max Kleiber (1893-1976) studied how much energy different animals expend at rest, and noticed something curious. A human weighs about 10 times more than a cat. But rather than expending 10 times the energy of a resting tabby, we only spend 6 times as much.
Kleiber was thus the first to notice that energy expenditure follows a 3/4 power law. What this means is that if you double the size of an animal, it will use about 2^3/4, or about 1.7 times as much energy.
In a sense, this law states that larger animals have a more efficient metabolism than the small ones.
According to some modern scientists, Kleiber’s law works as long as it is limited to describing only individual groups of organisms, such as bacteria, fish and mammals. But as soon as we switch from one group to another – for instance from bacteria to invertebrates, it can be no longer applied.
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