Research

The von Bertalanffy equation was developed in the 1940s and has since been the almost universal biologically motivated model to describe the ontogenetic growth of different species; it is characterized by the metabolic exponents a = 2/3, b = 1. West et al. (1997, 2001) suggested another pair of metabolic exponents (a = 2/3, b = 1) and provided biological reasoning for this choice. This project proposes biological reasoning for yet two other exponent pairs based on the ideas of Bertalanffy and West about metabolism and on a model of Parks (1982) about the dependency of growth on food intake.