olbigatory....
It's a COMIC.
P.
A team of scientists from the University of Cambridge has disagreeably grounded Spider-Man after concluding that were the arachnohuman crimefighter to use gecko-style sticky pads to scale buildings, they'd need to measure 40 per cent of his body surface.* That's because the bigger the animal, the less surface area versus …
no one's completely explained why larger animals require less energy and live longer.
there's a correlation, certainly.
i would suspect there would be something to do with energy requirements and telomeres and things.
anyway i find it fascinating the smaller you are (ant man) the more magical things you can seem to do.
sustain huge drops, lift amazing (proportionately) mass.
but you pay the price, as you lose volume ergo heat quicker you need a metabolism to cater to that, etc etc. utterly fascinating causal relationships.
SCIENCE!
Smaller creatures are also more susceptible to low-level radiation than large ones - ISTR seeing that in one of those "if humans suddenly vanished" documentaries that came out a few years ago. When our nuclear reactors break down, leaking radioactive shit all over the countryside, the show pointed out how small creatures like mice, birds and squirrels would be affected more than large creatures like moose or bears.
@Steven Roper,
that may be true for mammals, but certainly not true if you include other small creatures. Cockroaches have a reputation for being radiation resistant but other creatures fare far better:
http://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/cockroaches-radiation-wins/
abc.net.au/science/articles/2006/02/23/1567313.htm
http://wannabeentomologist.com/tag/insects-resistant-to-radiation/
So the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans and the Parasitic Wasp (Habrobracon) will inherit the earth after nuclear war.
I think it's difficult to properly correlate size with lifespan. It basically depends on different biological factors. I mean, certain breeds of smaller birds like macaws can live for 50+ years. For an animal that can stand on your arm, that's a pretty long time. So who's to say what can live how long?
For a start he doesn't use gecko sticky pads - rather a type of barbed hair follicle and a form of electromagnetism. This is why Elektro could disrupt the wall crawling ability. Although, if Spider-Man ever stood next to Donald J Trump then can you imagine how much he would frizz that piss coloured foppish hair?
Also, super heroes often exert powers that are difficult to replicate because.....fiction!
The article1 rather muddles volume and mass, or at least assumes density is fairly constant among animals.
And, yeah, to a first approximation that's generally OK, because a lot of that volume will be water and blah blah waving hands.
But Spiderman, particularly in the horrible newspaper comic, is clearly compose of at least 50% hot air by volume, and thus has much lower density.
1Can't be bothered to read the original paper because doing so might interfere with commenting.