Large animals walk more slowly because they have trouble cooling their bodies. An article about it was published on PLOS One. An animal’s ability to travel is extremely important to its survival and determines where and how far it can migrate. The ability to find food and mates and expand into new territories also depends on it. These problems have become especially acute with the development of human civilization, which has destroyed and disintegrated the environment.

Oleksandr Dyer and his colleagues created a model of the animal’s body movement and tried to find out how features of the animal’s structure affect movement. For this purpose, data on the body structure and lifestyles of 532 species, large and small, were used.

According to the authors’ hypothesis, larger animals should be able to travel faster because of their longer wings, legs or tails. At the same time, the researchers found that medium-sized animals tended to have the highest average speed over long distances. The researchers attribute this to the fact that larger animals need more time to dissipate the heat released by their muscles as they move, and therefore move more slowly to avoid overheating. They concluded that the speed of movement of any animal can be explained by considering how efficiently it uses energy and releases heat. In terms of physics, this is easily explained by the fact that the cooling efficiency is dependent on the skin area, and the mass and heat release increase.