Comment on It's just loss.
wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works 1 day agoIt would be MUCH more than 2x resource consumption, because every action that animal tales requires greater energy to move it around. The energy required to sustain larger lifeforms is significantly greater than the proportion of their mass.
yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
Not necessarily, many small animals have an utterly insane metabolism making them eat their entire body mass in a couple of days. For example, hummingbirds eat the human equivalent of 150,000 calories per day.
Larger animals typically cannot afford to spend so much energy - there is just no large food source that has sufficient calory density.
wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Good point! I’d love to see a by-species breakdown of average metabolic rate vs body mass.