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Heat Survival
29Aug,2024
Heat Survival
"I can't wait for fall!"
Tired of the summer heat? If you're hot-natured, summer temps might prompt you to wonder: How on Earth do wild animals survive this nonsense with fur coats, no A/C, and no water bottles?
That largely depends on which heat specialist animal you ask.
Kangaroos, for example, lick their forearms to help cool their blood down. Arabian oryx can smell rain from great distances and follow it to find plants (from which they get both their food and water). Fennec foxes have huge ears that help them keep cool by releasing heat through the blood vessels. And, famously, camels store water (though they store it in their blood, not their humps).
Many animals adapted to extreme heat are nocturnal - active at night, and hiding in their (relatively) cool burrows during the heat of the day. Desert mammals commonly have hairy ears and long eyelashes that help protect their senses from sand. Having a fur coat in a desert is actually not so bad - it protects skin from the Sun while providing a blanket through cold desert nights. Finally, many desert animals don't need much (if any) free-standing water, as they are adapted to get their water from their food. Fennec foxes and sulcata tortoises are two examples. There are a few ways to get water: Drinking it, extracting it from food, and via cellular metabolism (H2O is a product of cellular respiration). For comparison, humans can only extract about 20% of our necessary daily fluid intake from food. We also lack other special desert adaptations, such as water-preserving kidneys and fewer or no sweat glands (many desert animals have other ways of cooling down that don't cost water).
And that is how a furry fennec fox can handle life in the Sahara Desert while we sweat away by our office fans!
Photo credit: Anass ERRIHANI via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Tired of the summer heat? If you're hot-natured, summer temps might prompt you to wonder: How on Earth do wild animals survive this nonsense with fur coats, no A/C, and no water bottles?
That largely depends on which heat specialist animal you ask.
Kangaroos, for example, lick their forearms to help cool their blood down. Arabian oryx can smell rain from great distances and follow it to find plants (from which they get both their food and water). Fennec foxes have huge ears that help them keep cool by releasing heat through the blood vessels. And, famously, camels store water (though they store it in their blood, not their humps).
Many animals adapted to extreme heat are nocturnal - active at night, and hiding in their (relatively) cool burrows during the heat of the day. Desert mammals commonly have hairy ears and long eyelashes that help protect their senses from sand. Having a fur coat in a desert is actually not so bad - it protects skin from the Sun while providing a blanket through cold desert nights. Finally, many desert animals don't need much (if any) free-standing water, as they are adapted to get their water from their food. Fennec foxes and sulcata tortoises are two examples. There are a few ways to get water: Drinking it, extracting it from food, and via cellular metabolism (H2O is a product of cellular respiration). For comparison, humans can only extract about 20% of our necessary daily fluid intake from food. We also lack other special desert adaptations, such as water-preserving kidneys and fewer or no sweat glands (many desert animals have other ways of cooling down that don't cost water).
And that is how a furry fennec fox can handle life in the Sahara Desert while we sweat away by our office fans!
Photo credit: Anass ERRIHANI via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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