In a fundamental way, whales are just like amoebas.
Nature retains the same relative scales throughout and between all living things.
Now a particle physicist has teamed with ecologists to devise a model that explains why all biological systems are inherently similar. In a paper published in the April 4 issue of Science,Geoffrey West of Los Alamos National Laboratory and his colleagues James Brown and Brian Enquist at the University of New Mexico for the first time present a general model that predicts essential features of transport systems, such as vertebrate cardiovascular and respiratory systems, plant vascular systems and insect tracheal tubes. The model offers profound implications for macroscopic aspects of biology. The answer, he believed, was essential to understanding how evolution maximizes fitness. An animal 100 times larger than a mouse will not have a metabolic rate 100 times higher, as might be expected since it has so many more cells to feed.