ArticleRoyal Society open science2025
The geometry of life: testing the scaling of whole-organism surface area and volume using sharks.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Environmental and Protection Effects of Shark-Companion Associations Across Three Ocean Basins.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- The geometry of Nature's stingers is universal due to stochastic mechanical wear.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The ratio of surface area to volume is a key biological parameter that underpins our understanding of physiology across all levels of biological organization. Surfaces control the rate of key reactions and processes operating within the body and between organisms and their environment. Our understanding of surface area to volume ratios is embedded in the 2/3 scaling law, stating that surface area scales with volume raised to a power of 0.66. However, most empirical studies of surface area and volume scaling in animals focus on individual cells or tissues. Comparatively few studies have addressed these scaling relationships among species or ontogenetic stages at the whole-organism level. This study uncovers quantitative support for the 2/3 scaling law in an interspecific dataset at the whole-organism level. We find that the scaling of surface area to volume across 54 shark species (exhibiting an approx. 19 000-fold variation in body mass) is nearly identical to the isometric prediction of the 2/3 scaling law. There is no evidence that this relationship is driven by ecological or physiological characteristics. One plausible explanation is the presence of developmental constraints on tissue allocation that could influence the range of possible surface areas or volumes at any given body size.
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What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.