and what do cold-blooded creatures lack that does not allow them to self regulate temperature?
In: Biology
Warm blooded animals generate heat by burning calories. Cold blooded animals also generate heat WHEN they burn calories, for example, when using their muscles to move, but warm blooded animals are essentially leaving their engines on idle just to generate heat at all times.
And it isn’t a pure advantage, many cold blooded animals go weeks between meals because they are so much more energy efficient.
By burning calories for energy. You know how a car engine get hot when a car is running, and if you rev the engine a bunch it will get even hotter? That’s basically our cells. Our cells are like little car engines but instead of using gasoline for fuel, the use the food we eat. Our cells turn the food we eat into energy, and that makes heat. Just like how a car engine uses more fuel to drive faster and it gets hotter, when our cells use more food, they make more energy and get hotter.
So now that you know how our cells make heat, if our brain wants to warm up our body, it signals our cells to burn more food, which makes more energy and more heat. If we need to cool down, our cells can reduce the amount of energy they use (and therefore heat) the make up to a point, and we can also sweat.
“Cold-blooded” animals also generate heat this way. They don’t lack anything. They simply have other mechanisms for body temperature regulation. Some can function at a much wider range of temperatures than we do, and others rely on their environments. It’s not a disadvantage, it’s simply an alternate evolutionary adaptation.
When energy is created (in the mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell!), the process is not very efficient, and heat is a byproduct of that reaction. If all of our cells are functioning correctly, we exist at a stable temperature, regardless of what the temperature is outside the body. This is good, because that means we can live in a variety of different climates.
Since ectotherms (cold-blooded animals) don’t create all that energy to maintain an ambient temperature, they don’t require as much food, which is a pro. It’s not that they lack something to self regulate temperature, it was a trait that was selected for by evolution, since it led to an increase in organisms that lived long enough to survive and reproduce.
Thermoregulation (regulating the temperature of an animal) comparing what happens in cold blooded creatures like reptiles and that of warm blooded creatures like mammals. https://youtu.be/Tndw5QFpRUo
Heat is a byproduct of our metabolism, specifically when we use stored up sugars for energy. In warm blooded animals and more warm-blooded body parts of some traditionally colder animals, the body is constantly using up sugars simply to generate that heat. This allows warm blooded creatures to be at peak activity efficiency at all times regardless of environment, but also increases how much food they need to take in.
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