BbioRxiv9 Sep 2026
Local optimization of oxygen transport gives rise to Kleiber’s law
Peter F. Pelz, Tobias Meck
For nearly a century, the physical origin of metabolic scaling has remained unresolved: metabolism is proportional to body mass in small organisms but follows Kleiber’s three-quarter-power law in larger animals. We derive both regimes from the Metabolic Holon (MH), a locally optimized capillary–tissue oxygen-supply…