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Homeothermic
Homeothermy, homothermy, or homoiothermy () is thermoregulation that maintains a stable internal body temperature regardless of external influence. This internal body temperature is often, though not necessarily, higher than the immediate environment. Homeothermy is one of the 3 types of thermoregulation in warm-blooded animal species. Homeothermy's opposite is poikilothermy. A poikilotherm is an organism that does not maintain a fixed internal temperature but rather its internal temperature fluctuates based on its environment and physical behaviour. Homeotherms are not necessarily endothermic. Some homeotherms may maintain constant body temperatures through behavioral mechanisms alone, ''i.e.'', behavioral thermoregulation. Many reptiles use this strategy. For example, desert lizards are remarkable in that they maintain near-constant activity temperatures that are often within a degree or two of their lethal critical temperatures. Evolution Origin of homeothermy The evol ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Poikilothermy
A poikilotherm () is an animal (Greek ''poikilos'' – 'various', 'spotted', and ''therme'' – 'heat') whose internal temperature varies considerably. Poikilotherms have to survive and adapt to environmental stress. One of the most important stressors is outer environment temperature change, which can lead to alterations in membrane lipid order and can cause protein unfolding and denaturation at elevated temperatures. ''Poikilotherm'' is the opposite of '' homeotherm'' – an animal which maintains thermal homeostasis. In principle, the term could be applied to any organism, but it is generally only applied to vertebrate animals. Usually the fluctuations are a consequence of variation in the ambient environmental temperature. Many terrestrial ectotherms are poikilothermic. However some ectotherms seek constant-temperature environments to the point that they are able to maintain a constant internal temperature, and are considered actual or practical homeotherms. It is this d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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. The internal thermoregulation process is one aspect of homeostasis: a state of dynamic stability in an organism's internal conditions, maintained far from thermal equilibrium with its environment (the study of such processes in zoology has been called physiological ecology). If the body is unable to maintain a normal human body temperature, normal temperature and it increases significantly above normal, a condition known as hyperthermia occurs. Humans may also experience lethal hyperthermia when the wet bulb temperature is sustained above for six hours. Work in 2022 established by experiment that a wet-bulb temperature exceeding 30.55°C caused uncompensab ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Warm-blooded
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. Because there are more than two categories of temperature control utilized by animals, the terms ''warm-blooded'' and '' cold-blooded'' have been deprecated in the scientific field. Terminology In general, warm-bloodedness refers to three separate categories of thermoregulation. * Endothermy is the ability of some creatures to control their body temperatures through internal means such as muscle shivering or increasing their metabolism. The opposite of endothermy is ectothermy. * Homeothermy maintains a stable internal body temperature regardless of external influence and temperatures. The stable internal temperature is often higher than the immediate environme ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Endotherm
An endotherm (from Greek ἔνδον ''endon'' "within" and θέρμη ''thermē'' "heat") is an organism that maintains its body at a metabolically favorable temperature, largely by the use of heat released by its internal bodily functions instead of relying almost purely on ambient heat. Such internally generated heat is mainly an incidental product of the animal's routine metabolism, but under conditions of excessive cold or low activity an endotherm might apply special mechanisms adapted specifically to heat production. Examples include special-function muscular exertion such as shivering, and uncoupled oxidative metabolism, such as within brown adipose tissue. Only birds and mammals are considered truly endothermic groups of animals. However, Argentine black and white tegu, leatherback sea turtles, lamnid sharks, tuna and billfishes, cicadas, and winter moths are mesothermic. Unlike mammals and birds, some reptiles, particularly some species of python and tegu, po ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gigantothermy
Gigantothermy (sometimes called ectothermic homeothermy or inertial homeothermy) is a phenomenon with significance in biology and paleontology, whereby large, bulky ectothermic animals are more easily able to maintain a constant, relatively high body temperature than smaller animals by virtue of their smaller surface-area-to-volume ratio. A bigger animal has proportionately less of its body close to the outside environment than a smaller animal of otherwise similar shape, and so it gains heat from, or loses heat to, the environment much more slowly. The phenomenon is important in the biology of ectothermic megafauna, such as large turtles, and aquatic reptiles like ichthyosaurs and mosasaurs. Gigantotherms, though almost always ectothermic, generally have a body temperature similar to that of endotherms. It has been suggested that the larger dinosaurs would have been gigantothermic, rendering them virtually homeothermic. Disadvantages Gigantothermy allows animals to maintain body ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Enzyme
An enzyme () is a protein that acts as a biological catalyst by accelerating chemical reactions. The molecules upon which enzymes may act are called substrate (chemistry), substrates, and the enzyme converts the substrates into different molecules known as product (chemistry), products. Almost all metabolism, metabolic processes in the cell (biology), cell need enzyme catalysis in order to occur at rates fast enough to sustain life. Metabolic pathways depend upon enzymes to catalyze individual steps. The study of enzymes is called ''enzymology'' and the field of pseudoenzyme, pseudoenzyme analysis recognizes that during evolution, some enzymes have lost the ability to carry out biological catalysis, which is often reflected in their amino acid sequences and unusual 'pseudocatalytic' properties. Enzymes are known to catalyze more than 5,000 biochemical reaction types. Other biocatalysts include Ribozyme, catalytic RNA molecules, also called ribozymes. They are sometimes descr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ocean
The ocean is the body of salt water that covers approximately 70.8% of Earth. The ocean is conventionally divided into large bodies of water, which are also referred to as ''oceans'' (the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian Ocean, Indian, Southern Ocean, Antarctic/Southern, and Arctic Ocean),"Ocean." ''Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary'', Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ocean . Accessed March 14, 2021. and are themselves mostly divided into seas, gulfs and Lists of bodies of water#Seawater bodies, subsequent bodies of water. The ocean contains 97% of Water distribution on Earth, Earth's water and is the primary component of Earth's hydrosphere, acting as a huge Ocean heat content, reservoir of heat for Earth's energy budget, as well as for its carbon cycle and water cycl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lake
A lake is often a naturally occurring, relatively large and fixed body of water on or near the Earth's surface. It is localized in a basin or interconnected basins surrounded by dry land. Lakes lie completely on land and are separate from the ocean, although they may be connected with the ocean by rivers. Lakes, as with other bodies of water, are part of the water cycle, the processes by which water moves around the Earth. Most lakes are fresh water and account for almost all the world's surface freshwater, but some are salt lakes with salinities even higher than that of seawater. Lakes vary significantly in surface area and volume of water. Lakes are typically larger and deeper than ponds, which are also water-filled basins on land, although there are no official definitions or scientific criteria distinguishing the two. Lakes are also distinct from lagoons, which are generally shallow tidal pools dammed by sandbars or other material at coastal regions of ocean ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
