Keeping warm.

The great British weather is a thermo regulatory nightmare. Of coarse when it comes to to staying warm, we humans are lucky as we can put on our hats and gloves etc. But what about our wildlife, its out in all conditions three hundred and sixty five days a year. Some of those days the wildlife will have to cope with all four seasons in just twenty four hours. How does it cope? The first thing that wildlife can do is get big, fat and blubber. This is brilliant insulation and seals are a great example of this. The next thing it can do is to get pelo-erect, which is to get goose bumps. Erecting the hairs or fur to trap a layer of insulating air. Some other mammals have got another really neat trick. They have what we call a counter current heat exchange system (i have a previous blog about this). The blood vessels carrying the blood which has been to the bodies extremities- therefore is a little bit cool- run very close to the blood vessels that are coming out of the heart and therefore are carrying very warm blood. The warm blood  warms up the cool blood so that it doesn`t shock the animals metabolism, when it gets back to the core. That's all well when it comes to staying warm when its cool, but what about when it gets warm, staying cool when it gets hot. The first thing you can do is to get lazy, think of all those deers sat round on a warm summers afternoon, they are not moving so they don`t generate any heat, which they will then have yo loose. If they do get hot you may see them panting. We don`t need to pant because we can sweat to cool us down, both achieve the same thing. It`s about evaporating water from the skins surface to keep the body cool. There is one other trick that mammals do have. Basically they pump blood very close to their skin, so any air currents tat pass by cool it, the blood is than passed back into the body to cool those areas as well. This is called blushing.