Washington, Oct 1 (ANI): Asian elephants are able to tolerate high daytime temperatures by significantly lowering their body temperature during the cooler night hours, researchers have found.
By doing so they create a kind of thermal reserve that allows them to store heat and so prevent heat stress as temperatures rise during the day.
This finding is particularly interesting because it raises the possibility that heat storage is much more widespread among mammals than previously thought.
Heterothermy is an adaptive mechanism by which body temperature fluctuates in response to environmental temperature, decreasing at night when it is cooler and increasing gradually in the daytime.
Scientists at the Research Institute of Wildlife Ecology (FIWI) at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna investigated whether elephants make use of heterothermy.
To do so, they fed small telemeters, which permit the continuous recording of temperature, to a group of captive elephants in Thailand and a control group at the Munich Zoo Hellabrunn to monitor temperatures in the animals' gastrointestinal tract.
Researchers found that the overall mean body temperature was similar in both the Thai and the German study groups but fluctuations in body temperature were on average twice as large in the Thai animals as in the German individuals.
The Thai animals had both a higher daily peak temperature and a lower minimum temperature, which the scientists related to the higher mean ambient temperatures in Thailand.
In fact, the body temperature of the Thai elephants dropped at night to well below the normal average. This means that Thai elephants start the day with a much larger thermal reserve than their German counterparts.
The study has been published in the international Journal of Comparative Physiology B. (ANI)
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