Btukfyl

I'm a math teacher looking for data to help my students interested in biology complete a quantitatively flavored study of animals. (As a math person, I apologize if I'm not using discipline-appropriate vocabulary in my request here.)

I'd like to find a publicly available database that lists different animal species along with their average measurements of various biological variables (body mass, heart rate, body temperature, length, lung capacity, etc.). Can anyone point me to something?

I'm interested in having my students study the relationship between pairs of variables (i.e. body mass and heart rate), to model this relationship via an appropriate function, and to use their function to make predictions. To hone their models, students will need access to known data about these variables for a number of different animals. I could have them look up all of this data in separate places on the internet, but I'm hoping to find one location that has all (or most) of it.

Thanks in advance.

I'm not positive, but I assume you'll be hard-pressed to find a list that checks your boxes of needing both multiple metrics for multiple animals.

However...

Two sources that seem to prove me wrong:

1. 
   

   Thayer Watkins's webpage (San José State Univ.) found here, which includes:

   
   
   
   
   
   • Blood pressure, height of head above heart, weight, avg heart rate, longevity, and life-span
   
   
   
   

   for:

   
   
   
   
   
   • Humans, cats, dogs of various sizes, hamsters, chickens, monkeys, horses, cows, pigs, rabbits, elephants, giraffes, and whales. (also goats, turkeys, frogs and snakes -- not all metrics are represented for all organisms).
   
   
   
   


2. 
   

   "Normal Physiological Values for Select Animals" from Texas A&M found here, which includes:

   
   
   
   
   
   • temperature, heart rate, and respiratory rate
   
   
   
   

   for:

   
   
   
   
   
   • Cows, goats, horses, pigs, sheeps, rabbits, dogs, and cats.
   
   
   
   

Neither of these sources is quite consistent or complete (and I'm not sure of their credibility other than being on academic websites), but they should give you a start.

• Also, if you don't know, you can add "site:.edu" to the end of any google search to narrow searches (e.g., heart rates of animals, average body temperature of animals, etc.) for similar lists.

You might be interested in the PanTHERIA database for several thousand mammalian species. It has up to 53 characteristics for each species (but many fields have no entry). It is available as two plain text files, each with one line per species (plus header line) and fields separated by tabs. The files and data descriptions are available at http://esapubs.org/archive/ecol/E090/184/