Why do animals vary so much in life span?

epenguin

The subject is called "allometry" and is a full-time study for some people, so you can find more about it by googling that word, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allometry

Mute

I saw a talk recently by Geoff West from the Santa Fe Institute which discussed the scaling of animal lifetimes with metabolic rate. Even some single celled organisms - heck, even some molecules - appeared to fit in with the power-law scaling of lifespan with metabolic rate.

Some of the topic is touched on in this TED talk of his: http://www.ted.com/talks/geoffrey_we...porations.html