Wednesday, March 24, 2004

Baby lions and caterpillar growth

All The Stuff I Couldn't Fit in My AIM Profile is a blog I just found, thanks to her link to one of my posts (always a sign of good taste, if I say so myself). She's got some neat pictures of a baby lion - the first one was taken on November 15th, and the second one taken on January 6th. The difference in size is astounding, though the entomologist in me reminds me that the caterpillar Manduca sexta grows much more quickly on a mass-specific basis (approximately a 10,000-fold increase in mass in just about 3 weeks). If an eight pound human newborn grew as quickly as M. sexta, in 3 weeks it'd weigh 40 tons.

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