this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2025
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It's even worse because that relationship is already called the square cube law. It's not a fixed percentage. Raising it to the power of 0.67 is the same as squaring it and then taking the cube root. So if volume increases by a factor of 8, you'd expect surface area to increase by a factor of 4. If volume increases by a factor of 27, surface area should increase by a factor of 9.
It's always true for any object that maintains its exact shape while increasing or decreasing in size, but it also tends to apply to animals across different shapes because of gravitational and oxygenation constraints. It's why we don't have any animals with proportions like a sheet of paper standing on end.
The funny part to me was where they say "Sharks follow expectations, this changes everything!"