Metabolic heat production and thermal conductance are mass-independent adaptations to thermal environment in birds and mammals.

ABSTRACT: The extent to which different kinds of organisms have adapted to environmental temperature regimes is central to understanding how they respond to climate change. The Scholander-Irving (S-I) model of heat transfer lays the foundation for explaining how endothermic birds and mammals maintain their high, relatively constant body temperatures in the face of wide variation in environmental temperature. The S-I model shows how body temperature is regulated by balancing the rates of heat production and heat loss. Both rates scale with body size, suggesting that larger animals should be better adapted to cold environments than smaller animals, and vice versa. However, the global distributions of ∼9,000 species of terrestrial birds and mammals show that the entire range of body sizes occurs in nea

SUBMITTER: Fristoe TS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4702964 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature