Article Dans Une Revue American Journal of Physics Année : 2015

How fast do living organisms move: Maximum speeds from bacteria to elephants and whales

Résumé

Despite their variety and complexity, living organisms obey simple scaling laws due to the universality of the laws of physics. In the present paper, we study the scaling between maximum speed and size, from bacteria to the largest mammals. While the preferred speed has been widely studied in the framework of Newtonian mechanics, the maximum speed has rarely attracted the interest of physicists, despite its remarkable scaling property; it is roughly proportional to length throughout nearly the whole range of running and swimming organisms. We propose a simple order-of-magnitude interpretation of this ubiquitous relationship, based on physical properties shared by life forms of very different body structure and varying by more than 20 orders of magnitude in body mass. (C) 2015 American Association of Physics Teachers.

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Dates et versions

hal-02508936 , version 1 (16-03-2020)

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Nicole Meyer-Vernet, Jean-Pierre Rospars. How fast do living organisms move: Maximum speeds from bacteria to elephants and whales. American Journal of Physics, 2015, 83 (8), pp.719-722. ⟨10.1119/1.4917310⟩. ⟨hal-02508936⟩
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