Amphibian Intestine Allometry
M. J. Duque‐Correa, C. Meloro, S. Keller, P. Cigler, I. Wethli, J. Niehaus, M. Przybyło, M. Clauss · 2026
Read Amphibian Intestine Allometry by M. J. Duque‐Correa, C. Meloro, S. Keller, P. Cigler, I. Wethli, J. Niehaus, M. Przybyło, M. Clauss (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13184666.txt.
Description
Duque-Correa and colleagues measure frog and toad guts to complete a pattern found across the vertebrate family tree, in this study from twenty twenty-six. In fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals, intestine length grows faster than body size alone would predict, an exponent above the geometric third. Amphibians were the missing group.
Combining their own dissections with literature data, the team covered thirty-eight species, nearly all frogs, spanning two grams to over a hundred. Accounting for shared ancestry, amphibian intestines scaled with an exponent between about zero point four and zero point five, firmly in the same faster-than-geometry club. The proposed logic: bigger animals need surface area in proportion to their metabolism, but nutrients must stay close to the gut wall, so diameter grows slowly and length compensates. One rule, the authors show, runs from tadpole to mammal.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | M. J. Duque‐Correa, C. Meloro, S. Keller, P. Cigler, I. Wethli, J. Niehaus, M. Przybyło, M. Clauss |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 26 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |