Metric organisms

Whereas i am far more comfortable with the likes of watts, joules, metres and kilogrammes than i am with horsepower, yards and pounds, there are people out there, by whom i am in fact surrounded, to whom SI units are hard to relate. This is very frustrating.

One reason for this is the names of the units and the fact that they are homonymous with everyday items such as feet, nails and stones. Suppose then, that a child grew up with a breed of dog or cat called a kilo which had a mean mass of around a kilogramme, or were able to wander around a garden of metre flowers, dwarf sunflowers which grew to a height of a metre on the whole. Then there's the kilowatt, which is a particularly precisely bred horse or ox which can exert an average of a kilowatt of power, or the closely related tonne, another breed of horse which happens to have a mass of around that, and so forth.

An organism with very precise characteristics is probably impossible to produce, but one with mean characteristics close to the units concerned seems more feasible, with the proviso that drastically sexually dimorphic species would have to be avoided.

It shouldn't be too difficult to arrange, and for all i know the plants, animals and fungi are already out there. They just have the wrong names.