Living Organisms Effect On Ectotherms

Amongst many problems that living organisms face, one of the biggest is the change in the temperature of the environment. Why is this a major problem for living organisms? A change in the temperature of the environment disrupts many of the body’s enzymes and regulatory proteins, changing their shape and perturbing their function. However, organisms have taken two different approaches to tackling this problem we call this organisms endotherms and ectotherms but in this essay, we will talk about an endotherm the honeybee. How this living organism avoids overheating and how it keeps itself cool regardless of the surrounding temperature. What are endotherms? They are warm-blooded animals; that is, those that maintain a constant
So how do the honeybee keep their cool? The cooling down in honeybees is affected by what others are doing the bees use some strategies to cool down that are not dissimilar to our own. They collect water that can evaporate in the colony and cool it down. They also fan to circulate air around the colony. However, until recently, it was not clear how bees decided to start fanning scientist decided to look into how it is that bees decide to start fanning to cool their colony down. To see what temperature bees would start fanning at, they placed bees in a container and increased the temperature at 1°C per minute starting at room temperature (around 28°C). The bees were either put into the container alone, in a group of three, or in a group of ten. The researchers then watched the bees see when they would start fanning. They also looked to see whether this differ between different types of bee- because in honeybee colonies the workers have different roles (for example nurse, guard, fanner and forager) The scientists found that fanning bees were much more likely to fan when they were in larger groups (it was seen in 19% of single bees, 33% of bees in groups of three and 48% of bees in groups of ten). They also fanned at lower temperatures in larger