Animals habitat adaptations

Adaptations to Warm Habitats. When water evaporates into the surroundings, the vaporized molecules cany a great deal of heat away with them. One of the best ways to cool an animal s body is to evaporate water from its surface. Adaptations that take advantage of this property include sweating, panting, and licking the body. But water often is a limited resource in warm habitats such as deserts, so many desert animals have adaptations that reduce the amount of water that evaporates from the body. Most... 

Cold Habitats. Because of considerations of surface area relative to body mass, animals that live in cold habitats tend to have larger body sizes and smaller extremities (especially ears and legs) compared to their counterparts in warmer habitats. Animals that live in cold habitats also have a greater amount of insulation, such as fat, fur, or feathers. Behavioral adaptations include gathering in groups, which effectively decreases the exposed surface area of each individual. 

Most lists of emotions exclude the esthetic emotions, Pugh (1977) being an exception. Yet how can one otherwise account for the universality of art and music (see also Dissayanake, 1988 Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989) Various animals seem to have a preference for certain geographical features such a tendency would be adaptive in guiding nomadic species to appropriate habitats, just as humans everywhere seem to perfer savannah-like terrain for their parks. The appeal of ideal features of babies or mates might also be included under this emotion, but perhaps placed elsewhere. 

In the history of both animal and human ethology the direct observation of unstaged interactions in a natural habitat plays a critical role for methodological and theoretical considerations. Even when ethologists think that they already know much about adaptations and the ways in which they interact with the environment, the principles which have been involved in the evolution of increasingly complex human behaviour are still not very well understood. 

It has become Increasingly obvious to us that regulation of water balance In Insects Is one of the keys to the success of these animals In their adaptation to such a wide variety of habitats. The complexities Involved In undertaking studies of such systems may require expansion of our Interdisciplinary approach so as to Include such diverse fields as biophysics, ecology, and cell biology. The subject Is a fascinating one, perhaps all the more so due to Its complexity, and promises to open up new areas In which Interdisciplinary research will play a role. 

Among differently adapted species of fishes and invertebrates, the ABT of mitochondrial respiration varies regularly with adaptation temperature (figure 7.23, lower panel). The animals that were compared included deep-sea invertebrates from both warm (hydrothermal vent) and cold habitats plus several shallow occurring marine invertebrates and fishes adapted to widely different temperatures, including the Antarctic fish Trematomus ber-nacchii (boxed + symbol Dahlhoff et al., 1991 Weinstein and Somero, 1998). Also... 

In summary, the marine environment contains a wealth of plants, animals and microorganisms. Due to their unique adaptations to their ocean habitat, they contain a wide diversity of natural products. These compounds have shown activity in a variety of assays which have relevance to human diseases. As our understanding of the molecular basis of disease expands, these compounds and ones yet to be discovered will provide lead compounds for human therapeutic treatment. Innovations in synthesis, fermentation of symbionts as well as in manipulation of biosynthetic genes will allow us to produce sufficient material for clinical use of the compounds. Marine organisms provide a unique opportunity for access to chemical diversity. 

Sometimes, species that are not particularly prominent in their native habitat become important pests when they are introduced by humans into a new habitat. In such cases, these organisms are opportunistically responding to a novel ecological circumstance that enhances their access to resources. This response is made possible because the species are no longer constrained by the specifically adapted herbivores, predators, or diseases that occur in their native habitat, a situation that is referred to as ecological release. Most of the important species of weeds in agriculture have opportunistically responded to favorable circumstances in the new environments to which they have been introduced, as have invasive animal pests, such as rats and mice. 

Insects are the most diverse group animals on earth, with approximately five million species described to date (Novotny et al. 2002). Amidst this great diversity are adaptations common to all insects that maximize inclusive fitness in their respective habitats. One such fundamental adaptation is the ability to respond to cues in the environment, in particular the ability to detect external biological compounds via a chemical sensor. The sophisticated olfactory system of insects is able to sense volatile odorants derived from prey, host plants, and conspecific individuals. These compounds are detected by olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs) housed in the antennae, and these ORNs relay information about food sources, oviposition sites, and mates that leads to behavior based on neural responses mediated by the ORNs. The binding... 

The Aral Sea was always relatively poor in flora and fauna. This happened due to isolation of this water body and specific features of its regime. The Aral did not have many groups of animals that lived in other inland seas, e.g. in the Caspian and Azov seas. Many fish species of the Aral that originated in fresh and slightly saline waters were not adapted to essential changes of their habitat. 

Land-living crustaceans are truly fascinating animals that during a relatively short time have adapted to a number of highly diverse terrestrial habitats. In these habitats the crustaceans have become highly successful, and in some case the predominant life forms. Comparative studies between fully aquatic crustaceans and closely related terrestrial taxa provide a powerful means of investigating the evolution of chemosensory adaptations in these two environments. 

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