What are Warm Blooded and Cold Blooded Animals?

Suppose you are watching a program on Discovery Channel related to Snake and the voiceover says “Snakes can sense the warm-blooded animals even in the absence of light.” What triggers in your mind? What the heck is Warm Blooded? In this article, we will be looking at the concept of warm and cold-blooded animals and what makes them different.

Generally, all the species on this planet are divided into two broad categories.

1. Warm-blooded (endothermic)
2. Cold-blooded (ectothermic)

What is Warm Blooded Animals (Endothermic)

Living creatures that can maintain a constant body temperature regardless of external conditions are called Warm-blooded animals. They generate heat internally through metabolic processes and can regulate their temperature through various physiological and behavioural means.

What does this mean?

Let’s try to understand this with an example.

Humans have a normal body temperature of approx. 36 °C (96 °F).

This temperature will not change much even at one time I live in Norway or Dubai. It always remains the same irrespective of external conditions or unless we are not well and suffer from fever. We feel the external heat and cold but it does not make any difference in our body temperature.

Examples of Warm-blooded animals are all mammals and birds, including Humans.

What are Cold Blooded Animals (Ectothermic)?

Living creatures that cannot maintain a constant body temperature by themselves and are dependent on external conditions are called Cold-blooded animals.

This means cold-blooded animals do not have the same body temperature all the time. If the external temperature is hot, the body temperature also keeps increasing and vice versa. Thus you must have heard that snakes prefer to stay in bushes when it’s hot outside other they will die from rising body temperature.

Examples of Cold-blooded animals are Snakes, reptiles, frogs, fishes, amphibians etc.

Advantages & Disadvantages of being Warm and Cold-Blooded

1. The Advantage of warm-blooded animals is that they can be active in wide circumstances be it summer, winter or rainy.
2. Since external factor plays an important role, Cold blood can only be active if external factors allow them to be. If the external temperature is too Hot or cold they become very sluggish and can go into a state of Torpor (Torpor is similar to temporary hibernation which can last for a few hours within a day)
3. Warm Blooded have a higher metabolic rate than Cold Blooded which helps them to process food and digestion faster. Which allows it to convert into energy benefitting the body by providing energy quicker than cold-blooded.
4. The major disadvantage of being warm-blooded is that it requires certain energy to maintain a constant body temperature which means overall warm-blooded had to eat more to fulfil the extra energy requirement. This can also lead them to be an easier target for predators as they have to spend more time outside for food.

Fun fact – If you have a fever your temperature rises to a certain degree from the normal body temperature. But how will you identify fever in cold-blooded animals?

Hope you like this small informative article on warm and cold-blooded. Check out Life for more such interesting content.