Abstract
Organisms which live in the deserts of the world may be subjected to some of the highest (and also the lowest) ambient temperatures (TA) on the surface of the planet, but it is not merely the TA itself which poses thermoregulatory problems: it is also the scarcity of shade and water. Animals in deserts cannot always therefore escape to a cooler microclimate in the heat of the day, and they must conserve their water resources as far as possible; this means that evaporative heat loss has to be balanced against the availability of water, as shown in the previous chapter. How birds meet these environmental and physiological challenges is the subject of the following account.
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© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Maclean, G.L. (1996). Thermoregulation. In: Ecophysiology of Desert Birds. Adaptations of Desert Organisms. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-60981-7_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-60981-7_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-64639-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-60981-7
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