I’m an 8th grader, and am making flash cards. In the study guide, there’s something about a life process called regulation. I don’t really get what it does – I want to make my study set easy for me to understand. First day of this unit, so I’m hoping making a good study set will help me do well. Thanks!
In: 6
All living things are build themselves assuming certain parameters are met – for example, they might assume the temperature will be within a certain range, or that a certain amount of calories will be available every day in its environment, or that it won’t have giant open wounds in its skin.
But life happens, and the laws of physics don’t care what you want, so maybe today it’s too hot out, or there’s no food to be found, or you scrape your knee.
“Regulation” means the organism is actively doing something or other to try to keep the parameters in the range needed to keep on living. Too hot? The organism can “regulate temperature” by seeking shade or shedding excess heat through sweating or panting. No food? Then the organism can fiddle with its metabolism to consume energy from internal storage (fat, even muscle if things get really bad) and also use less energy over all, e.g. by not moving around as much. Big wound? The organism can try to mitigate the damage by patching up the hole, first with a scab and then a new layer of skin, and deploying a bunch of immune cells to the area to fight off any germs trying to get in through the breach.
The body’s chemistry works best under some very specific conditions. “Regulation” is when the body notices that something is deviating from the ideal, and sets off a cascade of responses to bring things back under control.
For example: If the body temperature drops, then the body reacts in a whole bunch of ways to warm it up: shivering, burning calories, changing blood flow, making you “feel cold”, etc. Similar cascades occur when your body is too warm, or there’s not enough water, or not enough blood sugars, or too much blood sugars.
A lot of this is controlled by part of the brain called the “hypothalamus”, but that’s just the controller, it relies on many other organs (and other parts of the brain) to get the job done.
Without regulation, life would be difficult, or much shorter. For example, diabetes is a disease where our bodies lose the ability to regulate blood sugars properly. Diabetic patients have to take conscious control of regulation themselves, with testing of their sugar levels, careful attention to their diet, and (if things go wrong) emergency dosing with glucose (sugar) (if their blood has too little sugar) or an injection of insulin (if their blood has too much)
The life process of regulation is the ability of an organism to maintain a stable internal environment. This process helps to keep the organism’s internal conditions within acceptable limits, even when the external environment changes. Organisms regulate their internal conditions by using feedback mechanisms that respond to deviations from the desired range of values.
Latest Answers