Definitions from
Wikipedia

 

 

"...physiologists have discovered that living human skin has extraordinarily high absorptivity and emissivity (0.97), greater than almost any other known substance."

Dr. Andrew Marsh

Thermoregulation  

Thermoregulation is the ability of an organism to keep its body temperature within certain boundaries, even when temperature surrounding is very different. This process is known as homeostasis: a dynamic state of stability between an animal's internal environment and its external environment (the study of such processes in zoology has been called ecophysiology or physiological ecology).

Whereas an organism that thermoregulates is one that keeps its temperature constant and adapts to the temperature of the environment, a thermoconformer changes its body temperature according to the temperature outside of its body.

It was not until the introduction of thermometers that any exact data on the temperature of animals could be obtained. It was then found that local differences were present, since heat production and heat loss vary considerably in different parts of the body, although the circulation of the blood tends to bring about a mean temperature of the internal parts. Hence it is important to determine the temperature of those parts which most nearly approaches to that of the internal organs.

Types of thermoregulation

There are two types of thermoregulation that are used by animals:

  1. physiological regulation: This is when an organism changes its physiology to regulate body temperature. For example, our body tends to sweat in order to cool our body down. Another example is when our bodies get cold, it likes to shiver so that the body can create some heat.
  2. behavorial regulation: This is when an organism changes its behavior to changes its body temperature. For example, when your body starts to get hot because of the sun, you may want to find a shade to cool yourself down.

All text on this page only - is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (see Copyrights for details). Disclaimers.

Learn more about indoor environmental quality.