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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.
Migratory Patterns: Animals that migrated long distances would have encountered a wide range of temperature conditions. Homeothermy could have evolved as a way to maintain energy-efficient migration by reducing the need to frequently stop and warm up.
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 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 ...
Endothermy does not provide greater speed in movement than ectothermy (cold-bloodedness)—ectothermic animals can move as fast as warm-blooded animals of the same size and build when the ectotherm is near or at its optimal temperature, but often cannot maintain high metabolic activity for as long as endotherms.
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]
Rather than animals developing the capacity to maintain high and stable body temperatures only to be able to thermoregulate without the aid of the environment, this theory suggests that thermogenesis is actually a by-product of natural selection for higher aerobic and metabolic capacities. [19]
Conversely, we are normally in surroundings that are considerably cooler than the body's core temperature of 37 °C (98.6 °F) creating a gradient for thermal energy flow from the core to the surroundings. Therefore, the body must ensure it can also minimize the loss of heat to around 100 watts, if it is to maintain core temperature.