Heat: v7

HERON WING SPREAD: Thermoregulation involves the regulation of heat in any living thing–a person, an animal, an insect–or even a plant.

HERON WING SPREAD: If you go out in the early morning, you may see heron perched on a branch or standing still on the ground extending its wings out. It’s using UV rays to kill microorganisms on its wings.

HERON WING SPREAD: If seals get too cold as they swim along, they will hold a flipper up out of the water. The sun heats the blood in the flipper and the warmed blood returns to the core of its body.

HERON WING SPREAD: When the seal gets warmed blood from the flipper it holds out of the water, its brain constricts millions of blood capillaries in its flipper to increase the blood flow to the flipper.

PENGUIN HUDDLING: It gets REALLY cold in the Antarctic. Temperatures there can reach -100º F, cold enough to kill the penguins.

PENGUIN HUDDLING: To survive this harsh environment, penguins gather by the millions into colonies to protect each other from the cold. 

PENGUIN HUDDLING: These clustered penguins provide a shield from the blasting winds as well as generating shared heat.  The only problem with the arrangement is that the penguins in the outer rows would be constantly exposed to the freezing temperatures unless something is done.

PENGUIN HUDDLING: If the penguins stayed put, they’d all die.  The outer penguins would freeze first, then after they died, the cold winds would take down the next outer row. This would continue to happen, each layer freezing until all the penguins had died.

PENGUIN HUDDLING: To keep this from happening, The penguins constantly rotate. All of them spin in circles so different parts of their bodies are exposed to the cold.

 PENGUIN HUDDLING: Once it gets too cold for the penguins on the outside, they move inward as they are replaced by fresh warm penguins from the center. The timing of the rotation is just right so not one penguin dies from the cold. This survival instinct and the exact timing of the penguins rotation comes pre-programed straight from their genetic code!