Animal science: thermoregulation
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Animal science: thermoregulation - Leaderboard
Animal science: thermoregulation - Details
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19 questions
| 🇬🇧 | 🇬🇧 |
| What is a poikilotherm? | An organism that has a variable body temperature. |
| What is a homeotherm? | An organism with a relatively constant body temperature. |
| What is a heterotherm? | An organism that varies between regulating and allowing the environment to determine its body temperature. |
| Give examples of both spatial and temporal heterotherms: | Spatial, penguins, use countercurrent heat exchange to keep their feet the same temperature as the ice compared to their warmed bodies. Temporal, bats, reduce their metabolism when at rest or hibernating. |
| Explain the differences between ectothermy and endothermy. | An ectotherm is an organism that's body temperature is determined by the external thermal conditions. Whereas endotherms are warmed through metabolic production in their bodies that release heat as a byproduct. |
| Describe the main influences on terrestrial ectotherms body temperature: | Temperature difference between the organism and the surrounding environment, surface temperatures and the thermal properties of the medium. |
| What is meant by thermal conductivity? | A measure of the flow of thermal energy through a material in a temperature gradient. |
| What is the relation between thermal conductivity and ectotherm body mass? | Thermal conductivity has an inverse relationship with body mass. |
| What is a Heliotherm and how does their behaviour change? | Heliotherm is an organism that uses their environment to warm and cool their body. Through choosing sunny or shaded environments, altering their orientation to the sun, and different skin and body colours. |
| What is a thigmotherm and how does this alter their behaviour? | Higmotherms are organisms that use direct contact with a warm object to obtain heat, such as nocturnal geckos that hide in trees all day in warm hollowed out branches before hunting in the cool night within microclimates. |
| What is the phrase given to ectotherms that can retain heat due to their low surface area to volume ratio? | Gigantothermy |
| What are some of the specialised methods of Endotherms to generate heat? | Shivering rapidly to generate heat through muscle contraction and non-shivering thermogenesis, metabolic processes that generate heat within the living tissue of organisms. |
| Name methods used by endotherms to retain heat: | Insulation such as sea otters that have the densest fur or any mammal up to 165,000 individual strands per 1cmˆ2. and vasoconstriction resulting in blood staying away from the skin where most heat is lost through convection. |
| What is shivering? | The unsynchronised contraction and relaxation of skeletal muscle motor units in high frequency rhythms or 10-20 per second that generate heat through metabolic reactions. |
| What are some mechanisms for minimising heat loss in marine mammals? | Blubber is an effective insulator in the marine environment, however, out of water, 2cm of fur is equal to 70cm of blubber, but is insufficient on its own for retaining body heat in the marine environment so a balance between the two in necessary to ensure the best heat retention. |
| What is meant by behavioural insulation? | The alteration of behavioural characteristics in challenging environments, the building of nests, burrowing, huddling and postural changes in order to keep warm and retain any body heat. |
| Sweating or panting, vasodilation and behavioural defences are all methods of what? | Cooling down for endotherms. |
| How can evaporative cooling change internal body temperatures? | Actively increasing the rate at which water evaporates from body surfaces ensuring increased rates of evaporation and heat transfer from the internal tissue to the external environment. |
| How can countercurrent heat exchange maintain a constant body temperature? | Outgoing warm blood in arteries and incoming veins carrying cold blood are located close to each other allowing for the transfer of heat from one to the other through conduction maintaining a constant temperature through out the blood. |