Blue Whales & Shrews

Nature's fascinating machinery at work.

From Discover...

A lifespan is a billion heartbeats. Complex organisms die. Remarkably, there exist simple scaling laws relating animal metabolism to body mass. Larger animals live longer; but they also metabolize slower, as manifested in slower heart rates. These effects cancel out, so that animals from shrews to blue whales have lifespans with just about equal number of heartbeats — about one and a half billion. In that very real sense, all animal species experience “the same amount of time.”

An important caveat from NPR...

Human beings used to fit into this pattern, but now that we have learned to drink safe water, wash and bathe and create medicines, we last longer than our size would predict.