Re: HELP DESPERATELY NEEDED

[Jeff Poling <jpoling@dinosauria.com>]

At 02:22 AM 11/22/96 -0500, Gautam Majumdar wrote:

>I found the following definitions in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of
>Ecology :
>
>Ectotherm - an animal that maintains its body temperature within fairly
>narrow limits by behavioural means such as basking or seeking
>shade.
>
>Endotherm - an animal that is able to maintain a body temperature that
>varies only within narrow limits by means of internal mechanisms.
>
> But it is still not clear to me that it should be called an
> ectotherm since it does not use behavioural means to maintain that
> temperature, except that it very rarely comes out of the burrows.

   If you look at this definition of endotherm, it requires that the
temperature be maintained by internal means.  I wonder if the NMR actively
burns calories and restricts bloodflows to maintain a temperature that just
happens to be the same as its burrow, or if there are no mechanisms and it's
completely at the mercy of burrow temperature.  My *assumption* was that it
is the latter, making it an ectotherm (you could consider burrowing "seeking
shade").

>But that food has to be processed internally to generate heat - that is
>endothermy.

   Then lizards are endotherms?  The question, I think, is what is done with
this heat/energy, as outlined in the paragraph above.

   I've completely forgotten how this thread got started.  What did this
have to do with dinosaurs? 

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