PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Jochen C. Rink
AU  - Albert Thommen
AU  - Steffen Werner
AU  - Olga Frank
AU  - Jenny Philipp
AU  - Oskar Knittelfelder
AU  - Yihui Quek
AU  - Karim Fahmy
AU  - Andrej Shevchenko
AU  - Benjamin M. Friedrich
AU  - Frank Jülicher
TI  - Body size-dependent energy storage causes Kleiber’s law scaling of the metabolic rate in planarians
AID  - 10.1101/332916
DP  - 2018 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 332916
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/05/30/332916.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/05/30/332916.full
AB  - Kleiber’s law, or the ¾-power law scaling of the metabolic rate with body mass, is considered one of the few quantitative laws in biology, yet its physiological basis remains unknown. Here, we report Kleiber’s law scaling in the planarian Schmidtea mediterranea. Its reversible and life history-independent changes in adult body size over 2 orders of magnitude reveal that Kleiber’s law does not emerge from the size-dependent decrease in cellular metabolic rate, but from a size-dependent increase in mass per cell. Through a combination of experiment and theoretical analysis of the organismal energy balance, we further show that the mass allometry is caused by body size dependent energy storage. Our results reveal the physiological origins of Kleiber’s law in planarians and thus have general implications for understanding a fundamental scaling law in biology.