bio

Aerobic dive limit

How long an organism can stay under while still living on the oxygen it brought with it, before its muscles are forced to burn energy without oxygen. The arithmetic is startlingly simple: total oxygen stores divided by the rate they are spent. Because stores scale directly with body mass while consumption scales only as mass to the three-quarter power, bigger animals dive longer for purely geometric reasons. Past the limit, lactic acid builds in the muscle and stays trapped there until surfacing, making the next dive wait — which is why deep divers keep more than 90% of their foraging trips inside it.