How Big can Animals Get?

As humans, we're pretty small. Sure we're not like bacteria or insects, but in the animal kingdom, a lot of things are bigger than us. In today's animals, there's elephants, giraffes and rhinos, and as we go further back in time we see even more creatures that were enormous, giant sloth and beavers, and of course dinosaurs. So some animals are pretty big, but how big can an animal actually get?

To answer this, we need to consider what helps, and what limits, animals from growing. Obviously there's no one point after which and animal simply can't grow, but as animals get larger and larger, the problems become more and more evident. 


All animals need energy every day, we get it through food and drink where we eat stuff, then our body breaks it down and releases energy from it. However the bigger the animal, the more it needs. This trend was noticed by Dr Max Kleiber ho came up with this lovely graph that shows basal metabolic rate (the lowest amount of energy an organism uses) against body mass. Known as the mouse - elephant curve, it shows that an organisms basal metabolic rate is proportional to the mass to the power of 0.734. Basically the bigger something is, the more energy it needs.


So why is this such a problem? well we get our energy from our environment, from eating, drinking and in some cases sunbathing, but the more energy we need, the more we need to consume and so the more we have to eat and drink and eventually it would reach a point where groups of these animals would decimate any environment through trying to get enough food to survive.

Next up is movement. Its a little known fact that the more mass something has, the more it weighs! This shocking fact, dictates that the larger the mass of an object, the larger the force of gravity on the object. Why is this important? Because animals with legs spend the whole time that they're standing up fighting against this force. Sure animals like whales could get around it by not standing on land, however if they were in a non buoyant environment (AKA not the ocean), their organs would be crushed by the force of their blubber's weight.


There is a mathematical law called the square cube law, which says that as an object's size increases by a factor, the volume increases by the same factor cubed, so as animals get a bit bigger, their volume increases a lot more. This volume would also cause problems with heat transfer making it likely to be prone to overheating and therefore vulnerable to certain illnesses and potentially cause it to struggle with ordinary enzyme based functions.

So what other problems would an organism of that size face? Well it would need an immense amount of oxygen which would have to be circulated entirely around the body of the animal and so the blood pressure, amount of vessels and the speed at which it goes around the body would have to be enormous.

On top of this it would find it extremely difficult to find shelter from the elements or escape from any predators. 

So in summary, in the unlikely event that its skeleton could handle the immense weight of its own mass, it would be likely to be eaten by predators, starve, cook itself with its own body heat or simply stop working because homoeostasis would be impossible on a massive scale.

So that's it for now, I really enjoyed writing this, it feels like my first actual post in months. Thank you all so much for reading and see you soon :)

Deadpool!! :D

Wassup internet? I'm personally a geek, and being a geek, I love superheroes. That's right, everything from Batman to Spider-man, I am a very big fan of superheroes.

But for me one superhero (if he can be called that) stands out above all the others, and since he's getting so much publicity right now, I thought its a good time to do a post about him. Therefore without further ado, lets talk about Deadpool!

What you thought this was going to be a blog post about science? Well Surprise! This is a different kind of blog post.

In this I'm just going to talk about Deadpool, the character, the feasibility and hopefully make more bad jokes along the way. (Guys seriously if you haven't seen it watch the trailer first).

So who is he? Deadpool is awesome in its purest form. A by-product of the same government that created wolverine, Deadpool was formerly Wade Wilson, a cancer sufferer who was promised a cure. To be fair the government kept their promise, as a healing factor was implanted into him from a mutant, however he was later experimented on in an inhumane manner before being left for dead where his sheer anger kick-started his healing factor and so our hero was born.

Deadpool is scarred, both body and mind, as a result of the experiments performed on him, as a result this allows for an extremely interesting mindset for the writers to explore when writing his stories. However the most defining trait by far, is that he breaks the fourth wall!

Deadpool is in fact aware that he is a character in a comic book and often addresses his readers directly, allowing for even more interesting angles to take. Basically he is a character that you can do literally anything with, and a stroke of genius on the behalf of the creator.

Secondly, the feasibility. So what is it Deadpool can do? As previously mentioned, he has one hell of a healing factor, one of the most extensive ones in the marvel universe, to the level where he can survive stabbings, being blown up, being blown up by nukes, the vacuum of space and even the odd decapitation. Is this possible?



Nah.


It's highly likely that regeneration could be spiced into the human genome, especially as regenerative capabilities are demonstrated many people who have regrown small sections of fingers and toes and in each and every one of us in our livers and kidneys. But regrowing an arm? this would simply require an amount of energy and efficiency which our bodies can't achieve.

Deadpool also breaks the fourth wall, now for this to be possible, we would have to be living in an artificially created world and constantly observed by more intelligent beings for amusement. However this concept has reminded me of another interesting ideas.

Until recently it was accepted largely that it was possible that our entire universe could have been a hologram which we simply existed inside. However somehow they actually managed to test it recently and found no sign of us living in a hologram. Which is good I guess because that way nobody can accidentally turn off the universe.

http://www.iflscience.com/universe-probably-not-hologram

Also I should probably mention that Deadpool isn't actually intentionally breaking the fourth wall. He is insane and thinks that he is in a comic book, but as luck would have it he is actually right.

Anyway guys that's Deadpool, an inappropriate, crazy, violent merc with a mouth.

Sorry about the lack of posts but I'm swamped at the moment, see you all soon! :)