and what do cold-blooded creatures lack that does not allow them to self regulate temperature?
In: Biology
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.
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