Indirect measures of soil invertebrate body mass M based on equations relating the latter to
body length (l) are becoming increasingly used due to the required painstaking laboratory
work and the technical difficulties involved in obtaining some thousands of reliable weight
estimates for animals that can be very small. The implicit assumption of such equations is
that dM/dV= δ, where V is body volume and δ is a constant density value. Classical
Euclidean scaling implies that V∝ l3∝ M. One may thus derive M from l when the latter can …