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Alright!
So the following rule explains why:
...ants are so strong in relation to their weight (and why elephants are so weak in relation to their weight)
...warm-blooded animal babies have different proportions than they do as adults, whereas cold-blooded
animals already have the exact proportions they'll have as adults.
...animals don't get bigger past a certain point.
...why buildings are increasingly more difficult to built, the bigger they get.
Here we go:
Imagine the following cube:
edge-lengths: 1m/1m/1m
volume: 1m³
weight: 1t
surface area (bottom): 1sqm
weight-loading on the bottom surface area/weight-distribution: 1t/sqm
So far so good, now let's imagine a cube which is twice as tall (and wide, thick, etc.).
edge-lengths: 2m/2m/2m
volume: 8m³
weight: 8t
surface area (bottom): 4sqm
weight-loading on the bottom surface area/weight-distribution: 2t/sqm
Conclusion: while the second cube has four times the surface area (and thus also a bottom area 4 times as big), the weight of the second sube is 8 (!) times that of the first cube, thus it has a higher weight-loading per squaremeter.
For this reason, cats (and other small animals) can fall from very high without hurting themselves, while an elephant would break its legs from 1m of falling height or so.
This so called "square cube law" is also the reason why smaller powerlifters can be stronger in relation to their bodyweight than bigger powerlifters.
(The cross-section-area of the muscle is the most important factor when it comes to muscle strength.)
It's the same reason why some bugs and ants can lift up to 1000 times+ their bodyweight.
It's also the reason why the babies of cold blooded animals are (way) smaller in comparison to their adult size and also why they can afford to already have the same proportions as hatchlings. (E.g. crocodiles).
Warm-blooded animals on the other hand, always need to sustain a certain temperature to survive, and since the ratio of volume to surface area gets worse in terms of keeping warmth the smaller a body gets, warm-blooded babies are:
a) rather big as babies, compared to their cold blooded counterparts,
b) in their proportions closer to a ball (short limbs, rounder, thicker bodies) as a ball has the least surface area of all geometrical bodies, enabling it to hold warmth the easiest.
Basically, all this is due to the fact that both two-dimensional and three-dimensional things matter in regards to the physics of our bodies, but two-dimensional measurments always rise by ², whereas three-dimensional measurements obviously rise by ³, so they're not proportional to each other.
