Defination of Thermoregulation Essay

Defination of Thermoregulation
The process that allows a living body to maintain its core internal temperature that is indalependent of environmental temperature.
Introduction
Classification and habitat
Vultures belong to kingdom animilia, phylum chordata and their class is aves. These are commonly called as birds as well as.
Vulture is the name that is given to two main groups
It includes the Californian and Andean condors and the Old World vultures that includes the birds that are seen scavenging on carcasses of dead animals on African plains. New World vultures are found in North and South America and the Old World vultures are found in Europe, Africa and Asia it means that between the two groups, vultures are found on almost every continent except Australia and Antarctica.
A particular character of many vultures is a bald head devoid of normal feathers. Although it is historically believed to help keep the head clean when feeding, research has shown that the bare skin plays an important role in thermoregulation. Vultures have been observed to hunch their bodies in their heads in the cold and open their wings and stretch their neck in the hot.
Vultures(google pictures.com(2016april23)
Adaptations with respect to thermoregulation
Vulture maintain their internal temperature and are well adapted. They maintain their temperature according to the environment in outside. So they perform thermoregulation according to change in external environment.
To minimize the energy of thermoregulation in vulture use a variety of morphological and behavioral characters to adjust their rates of heat loss and heat gain. Unfeathered body surface act as important site for heat exchange with the environment
Adaptations in colder environment
Spreading of wings
Vulture often sit around with their wings only partially folded, partly hanging down at their sides. one reason for this is that they are sun-bathing and are used their wings to soak up heat. This behaviour is well known for Turkey vultures Cathartes aura in particular.
[photo by Markus Buhler, taken at Berlin Zoo]
In cold weather, captive Andean condors are reported to mostly sit still, with their neck ruffs pulled up to the head.
Veins ant artries
To minimize heat loss, the arteries and veins in the legs of many birds lies in contact with each other and function as a countercurrent heat exchange system to retain heat. Arterial blood leaves the vulture's core at body temperature, while veinous blood in the bird's foot is quite cool. As the cool blood returns toward the core, the heat moves by conductance from the warm arteries into the cool veins. So the arterial blood reaching the feet is already cool and veinous blood reaching the core has already been warmed. In addition, by constricting the blood vessels in its feet a vulture may further decrease heat loss by reducing the amount of blood flow to its feet .So the core temperature of a black vulture standing on ice may be 104 degrees F and its feet may be only slightly above freezing.