Why are we Warm blooded ?

There are many advantages to being warm-blooded. Warm-blooded animals can remain active in cold environments in which cold-blooded animals can hardly move. Warm-blooded animals can live in almost any surface environment on Earth, like in arctic regions or on high mountains where most cold-blooded animals would have difficulty surviving. Warm-blooded animals can remain active, seek food, and defend themselves in a wide range of outdoor temperatures. Cold-blooded animals can only do this when they are warm enough. A cold-blooded animal’s level of activity depends upon the temperature of its surroundings. A reptile, for example, will increase its body temperature before hunting and is better able to escape predators when it is warm. Cold-blooded animals also need to be warm and active to find a mate and reproduce.

Being cold-blooded, however, also has its advantages. Cold-blooded animals require much less energy to survive than warm-blooded animals do. Mammals and birds require much more food and energy than do cold-blooded animals of the same weight. This is because in warm-blooded animals, the heat loss from their bodies is proportional to the surface area of their bodies, while the heat created by their bodies is proportional to their mass. The ratio of a body’s surface area to its mass is less the larger the animal is. This means that larger warm-blooded animals can generate more heat than they loose and more easily keep their body temperatures stable. Smaller warm-blooded animals loose heat more quickly. So, it is easier to stay warm by being larger. Warm-blooded animals cannot be too small or else they will loose heat faster than they can produce it.

Being large requires a greater food supply, but for mammals, being small also requires a lot of food to generate more heat. Small mammals need to eat very often to survive because they need more energy to keep a constant body temperature. They also need to eat high energy foods such as fruit, seed, and insects and even other small mammals. Larger mammals can get by with eating lower energy foods or eating less often. In an environment where food is scarce, such as in deserts, reptiles have an advantage. Since cold-blooded animals do not have to burn a lot of food to maintain a constant body temperature, they are more energy efficient and can survive longer periods without food. Many cold-blooded animals will try to keep their body temperatures as low as possible when food is scarce.

Another disadvantage to being warm-blooded is that warm-blooded bodies provide an nice warm environment for viruses, bacteria and parasites to live in. Mammals and birds tend to have more problems with these infections than do reptiles, whose constantly changing body temperatures make life more difficult for these invaders. However, an advantage of this is that mammals and birds have developed a stronger immune system than cold-blooded animals. A reptile’s immune system is more efficient when the animals is warmer, however, since bacteria probably grow more slowly in lower temperatures, reptiles sometimes lower their body temperatures when they have an infection.

~ by Raju Gurusamy on September 16, 2007.