Metabolism is "the fire of life." Animals take in food from their environment and transform it metabolically to fuel all living processes, including growth, maintenance, foraging, defense, and reproduction. Thus, the rate of metabolism provides a fundamental index of how fast an organism lives. Principally, we are interested in the problem of metabolic scaling; that is, how the rate of metabolism changes with the size of the organism. Across over 20 orders of magnitude in size, spanning creatures as different as bacteria and blue whales, metabolic scaling takes on a consistent mathematical form known as an allometric power law. However, we currently lack a complete explanation for why the pattern takes the form that it does. To meet this challenge, we have established a collaborative group of undergraduate and faculty researchers in mathematical biology to study metabolic scaling in larvae of the tobacco hawkmoth, Manduca sexta, which is the familiar "hornworm" known by many gardeners as the bane of their tomato plants. Small interdisciplinary research teams use varied molecular, morphological, and physiological approaches combined with mathematical modeling and statistics to investigate factors that underpin metabolic scaling. Manduca is an ideal experimental platform for the study of metabolic scaling, because the larvae grow approximately 10,000-fold in mass in less than three weeks, without large changes in morphology or behavior. The ability to address metabolic scaling in an experimental setting provides a unique opportunity to test recent theories proposed to explain the origin of metabolic scaling, including those focused on the importance of fractal-like exchange surfaces and resource distribution networks inside organisms.