Researchers have found that the metabolisms of organisms appear to scale proportionally to a 3/4 power of their mass. Mathematics in this article suggests that the capacity of isotropic energy distribution scales up by a 4/3 power as size, and therefore the degrees of freedom of its circulatory system, increases. Cellular metabolism must scale inversely by a 3/4 power, likely to prevent the 4/3...

An axiomatic feature of food consumption by animals is that intake rate and prey abundance are positively related. While this has been demonstrated rigorously for large herbivores, it is apparent from patch selection trials that grazers paradoxically tend to prefer short, sparse swards to tall, dense swards. Indeed, migratory herbivores often shift from areas of high to low sward biomass during...