What is it about cold blooded animals such as reptiles and amphibians that makes it so that they can’t regulate their own temperature? Doesn’t their metabolism produce heat in the same way that warm blooded animals do?
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Conservation of energy, they don’t need energy to produce heat, so they don’t have to eat that regularly. So they don’t spend a lot of energy into searching for food, they can ambush even if they have to wait a long time.
There is a video on youtube that covers this in depth.
It’s not that their metabolism doesn’t produce heat, it’s that their bodies aren’t equipped to keep their temperature at a specific range.
When you get cold, you shiver. When you get hot, you sweat. Your body has functions to keep your own temperature at a given range.
When a lizard gets cold, it has to *move into a warm spot*. When it gets hot, it has to *move towards a cooler spot*. They rely on external conditions to regulate their temperature. Granted, they are using their own body to move towards warm/cold areas, but we can do that as well, in addition to our own bodies helping to regulate the temperature.
So evolution is about trade offs. The trade off for mammals, birds and just any warm blooded animal is that you have higher overall mobility, metabolism, and immune system. They will stay (more or less) unchanged regardless of environment and activity. The negative, they need to consume way more calories than a cold blooded animal of a comparable size.
It’s not that they cant produce heat, but they don’t always have additional ways to produce it (like shivering) or ways to insulate (like fat). L
The animal kingdom is super weird, though. I’m sure there are plenty of exceptions to my explaination above
Why would they want to?
You’re coming at it from the wrong direction.
Endothermic animals aren’t superior to ectothermic ones. They’re just different.
If you lived in a place where the weather was conducive enough, and food was kind of scarce, you’d evolve to be ectothermic too.
It’s a survival strategy. They burn a fraction of the calories which allows them to eat a fraction of the food. In lean times, they’re less susceptible to famines than endotherms, but more susceptible crazy weather.
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