The Metabolic Rate of Endotherms in Relation to Cold Temperatures

Christopher Spencer, Madison Schein, Kenesha Stewart, Ellie Seaton, Lindsey Worcester


 As endotherms, we are able to experience the everyday benefit of being able to maintain our body temperature in spite of difference in the surrounding environment. Because of this we became interested in how exactly endotherms thermoregulate and decided to conduct an experiment to explore this mechanism. Mice were chosen because they are the most readily available endotherms, which share a close relation to humans. Our hypothesis states that there is a positive correlation between low temperatures and the metabolic rate of mice because mice are endotherms; when placed in low temperatures, their metabolic rate will increase to keep their bodies at a stable temperature. In the experiment, to evaluate this claim, we conducted six trials where the CO2 levels of mice were collected for 5 minutes intervals at cold and room temperatures, which were used to determine metabolic rate. Our experiment shows that, when placed in cold temperatures, an endotherm’s metabolic rate will increase and this increase seems to be linked to the endotherm’s ability to thermoregulate.

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