Scientists have discovered a warm-blooded fish | Hacker News Reader

Scientists have discovered a warm-blooded fish

washingtonpost.com

82 pointsdavidst7 comments

This fish is not "fully warm-blooded". As described in the article, it does not target a specific body temperature like mammals or birds. It just uses its muscles to warm itself, like some species of snake and insect do.

Does targeting a specific temperature determine if you're classed as warm blooded?

Relevant article snippet:

"Some other types of fish, such as tuna, have similarly designed blood vessels in certain parts of their bodies, allowing for “regional endothermy” — warm-bloodedness that’s limited to certain organs or muscles, such as the eyes, liver or swimming muscles.

But the opah is the only fish scientists know of that has this design in its gills, where most fish lose the majority of their body heat to the surrounding cold water. By warming up the blood in the gills before it goes anywhere else, the opah achieves not just regional endothermy, but whole-body endothermy, according to the paper’s authors.

Testing showed that the opah is able to maintain a core body temperature about 5 degrees Celsius warmer than the surrounding water."

The nice thing about warm-blooded animals targeting a narrow body temperature range is that our genetic and protein structures can be much simpler.

A cold blooded animal has to have a wide selection of proteins to do the same job at different temperatures. A warm blooded animal needs just one.

Air cooled Volkswagen tolerances.

>> Testing showed that the opah is able to maintain a core body temperature about 5 degrees Celsius warmer than the surrounding water.

I'm curious, what tasting will show.

meh, this seems to be equivocation. basically, warm blooded (and cold-blooded) are no longer used (because they found animals didn't cleanly fit into the features of each), so they have a bunch of other words that describe the components of blooded-ness -- like, does the animal maintain a specific body temperature, does it use heat to convert sugars into (ATM) energy. What they've found is the first fish to warm water on entry to gills so that THAT water doesn't bring the temperature of the fishes body down too low.

meh

Basically yes, though according to the article the fish is heating cold blood with warm blood, not the water passing through its gills.

Like birds legs: http://askanaturalist.com/why-don’t-ducks’-feet-freeze/

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