Large animals walk more slowly because they have trouble cooling the body. article about it published On PLOS One.
An animal’s ability to travel is crucial to its survival and determines where and how far it can migrate. It also affects the ability to find food and mates and spread to new territories. These problems have become particularly acute with the development of human civilization, which has destroyed and fragmented habitats.
Alexander Dyer and his colleagues created a model of the movement of the animal’s body and tried to find out how features of its structure affect movement. For this purpose, data on the body structure and life styles of 532 species, large and small, were used.
According to the authors’ hypothesis, larger animals should be able to travel faster because of their longer wings, legs or tails. At the same time, the researchers found that medium-sized animals generally have the highest average speed over long distances. The researchers attribute this to the fact that larger animals take longer to dissipate the heat produced by their muscles as they move, and therefore must move more slowly to avoid overheating. They concluded that the speed of movement of any animal can be explained by how efficiently it uses energy and produces heat. In terms of physics, this is easily explained by the fact that the cooling efficiency depends on the area of the skin and the heat release increases with the mass. In this case, the mass of a ball (or cube) made of any material always grows faster than its surface area.
Previously, biologists confirmed that moths have “tails.” work as bait for bats.