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GODZILLA Urinates Like a Thunderstorm

Imagine fleets of fire-fighting helicopters dumping a thunderstorm’s worth of water on your city every 24 hours, and then you’ll have an idea of the other kind of destruction Godzilla would cause.

The latest iteration of Godzilla indeed features The King of The Monsters. 2014’s ginormous dinosaur is larger than any other kaiju on record — bigger than anything in Pacific Rim or any previous movie installment. Godzilla isn’t just bigger; it’s also much, much heavier. According to stats provided by Legendary Entertainment, the city-smasher weighs in at 90,000 tons. That’s one and half Titanics.

This kind of weight is hard to conceptualize, so maybe a better comparison would be to figure out how much Godzilla… urinates.

Dr. Craig McClain — when he isn’t being the Assistant Director of Science for the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center — answers such questions. It turns out that as varied as animals are, many of their qualities follow pretty simple equations.

In a blog post, McClain explains that biological properties — such as heart mass, pulse rate, and yes, urine production—can scale with something like variable of interest = a (mass)^b. That is to say, as an animal gets heavier, the rest of its bodily functions quickly get super-sized too.

These factors also depend on the type of animal. For example, if the “Category V” kaiju “Slattern” from Pacific Rim had the physiology of a bird, its heart might be roughly four tons. But if Slattern had the physiology of a fish, its heart could be as much as 22 tons!

Animals of different sizes have different feeding habits too. Based on roughly how many calories are contained in a person and how many calories per kilogram of body mass animals need, Dr. McClain claims that a Slattern with a Komodo dragon’s appetite would need to eat about 56 people a day to satisfy its hunger. And if it had a frog’s bladder, it would produce 1.5 million gallons of urine a day.

What about Godzilla?

Using Dr. McClain’s data as a basis along with the weight provided by Legendary Entertainment, the new Godzilla would produce 1 billion liters of urine every day. That means building stomping accompanied by a large thunderstorm’s worth of rain every day that Godzilla roams a city. And it wouldn’t be a sprinkle, a shower, or a drizzle–it would be a deluge.

Who knew a city’s sewer system would take such a beating too?

HT: Deep Sea News

IMAGE: Godzilla Wallpaper by Spitfire666xXxXx

Kyle Hill is the Chief Science Officer of the Nerdist enterprise. Follow the nerdery on Twitter @Sci_Phile.

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