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Warm-blooded is a term referring to animal species whose bodies maintain a temperature higher than that of their environment. In particular, homeothermic species (including birds and mammals) maintain a stable body temperature by regulating metabolic processes. Other species have various degrees of thermoregulation.
Thermoregulation is the ability of an organism to keep its body temperature within certain boundaries, even when the surrounding temperature is very different. A thermoconforming organism, by contrast, simply adopts the surrounding temperature as its own body temperature, thus avoiding the need for internal thermoregulation.
Environments with unpredictable temperature changes might have favored animals that could regulate their body temperature internally, allowing them to adapt to varying conditions. Coevolution with Microorganisms: Homeothermy might have evolved in response to interactions with microorganisms, such as parasites and pathogens. Warm-blooded animals ...
Regional heterothermy describes organisms that are able to maintain different temperature "zones" in different regions of the body. This usually occurs in the limbs, and is made possible through the use of counter-current heat exchangers, such as the rete mirabile found in tuna and certain birds. [4]
An ectotherm (from the Greek ἐκτός (ektós) "outside" and θερμός (thermós) "heat"), more commonly referred to as a "cold-blooded animal", [1] is an animal in which internal physiological sources of heat, such as blood, are of relatively small or of quite negligible importance in controlling body temperature. [2]
The body temperatures of many small birds (e.g. hummingbirds) and small mammals (e.g. tenrecs) fall dramatically during daily inactivity, such as nightly in diurnal animals or during the day in nocturnal animals, thus reducing the energy cost of maintaining body temperature. Less drastic intermittent reduction in body temperature also occurs in ...
The pre-flight warm-up behavior of a moth. Insect thermoregulation is the process whereby insects maintain body temperatures within certain boundaries.Insects have traditionally been considered as poikilotherms (animals in which body temperature is variable and dependent on ambient temperature) as opposed to being homeothermic (animals that maintain a stable internal body temperature ...
This in turn, raises its body temperature to 37.5 °C (99.5 °F), compared to 31.7 °C (89.1 °F) when present in other habitats. [2] Its body temperature is also observed to be more stable. [ 2 ] On the other hand, burrows without birds did not provide this heat, being only 28 °C (82 °F).