Survival Time of Princess Kaguya in an Air-Tight Bamboo Chamber

Akio Inoue¹ and Hiroyuki Shima²*

¹Faculty of Environmental and Symbiotic Sciences, Prefectural University of Kumamoto, 3-1-100 Tsukide, Higashi-ku, Kumamoto, Kumamoto 862-8502, Japan
²2Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Yamanashi, 4-4-37, Takeda, Kofu, Yamanashi 400-8510, Japan
*E-mail address: hshima@yamanashi.ac.jp

(Received September 14, 2017; Accepted March 15, 2018)

Abstract. Princess Kaguya is a heroine of a famous folk tale, as every Japanese knows. She was assumed to be confined in a bamboo cavity with cylindrical shape, and then fortuitously discovered by an elderly man in the forest. Here, we pose a question as to how long she could have survived in an enclosed space such as the bamboo chamber, which had no external oxygen supply at all. We demonstrate that the survival time should be determined by three geometric attributes regarding her body and the bamboo chamber. We also emphasize that this geometric problem shed light on an interesting scaling relation between biological quantities for living organisms.

Keywords: Metabolic Rate, Respiration, Allometry, Biophysics