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t1_j42lbb2 wrote

Reply to comment by in How do giraffes breathe? by

The googles say that a male giraffe average is 2628 lbs. Given that's about 13x the size of a human I'd expect a similar lung capacity; 8x seems small.

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t1_j4452r8 wrote

Mass and volume scale a bit differently when it comes to biology.

For example, average blue whale weighs about 310,000lbs, easily weighing over 2,000 times as much as an average (about 154lbs) person.

Yet Blue Whale lung capacity can reach 5,000 litres, while average Joe sits around 6 litres. A whale "only" has a bit over 800 times the volume.

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t1_j473n0a wrote

My intention was to say that it's a nonsensical way to explain how a giraffe copes with a long neck given the lungs really aren't that large compared to their mass.

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