Heterothermy
metabolic system
Heterothermy or heterothermia (from Greek ἕτερος heteros "other" and θέρμη thermē "heat") is a physiological term for animals that vary between self-regulating their body temperature, and allowing the surrounding environment to affect it. In other words, they exhibit characteristics of both poikilothermy and homeothermy.
Definition
Heterothermic animals are those that can switch between poikilothermic and homeothermic strategies. These changes in strategies typically occur on a daily basis or on an annual basis. More often than not, it is used as a way to dissociate the fluctuating metabolic rates seen in some small mammals and birds (e.g. bats and hummingbirds), from those of traditional cold blooded animals. In many bat species, body temperature and metabolic rate are elevated only during activity. When at rest, these animals reduce their metabolisms drastically, which results in their body temperature dropping to that of the surrounding environment. This makes them homeothermic when active, and poikilothermic when at rest. This phenomenon has been termed 'daily torpor' and was intensively studied in the Djungarian hamster.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Heterothermy” is metabolic system. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Heterothermy, metabolic and system, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2263509. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Heterothermy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.