Warm-blooded tegus? Sort of....

[Roadkill]

Today I am proud to finally announce what is perhaps my most profound discovery with tegus - the ability to physiologically produce elevated body temperatures during reproductive season. This is a finding I had discovered well over a decade ago, and it has taken me and my colleagues this much time to do some further experiments to verify this claim and actually get people to realize we're not crazy. Who doesn't know what they're talking about now, Mr. Hill?
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/1/e1500951.full

 

[Walter1]

Congratulations. That's an important find. So the temp differential is above and beyond what one would find caused by external factors. Would be very helpful in speeding up egg development in this highly seasonal animal.

 

[Roadkill]

Yes, the differential is certainly above and beyond what is expected. When I had first uncovered this phenomenon, basically I had come to the end of my time for doing research down in Brasil and I had to leave. While my supervisor at the time wanted to go with the idea that what we saw was endothermy, I had stressed we really needed to prove it was actually this and not either a behavioural issue or an influence from the environment that we couldn't account for (from my own data, all we had were a few select days where the tegus hadn't left their burrows because of rainfall). Unfortunately, as we had learned from my prior research, getting tegus to go into hibernation wasn't exactly a simple recipe to follow, so we felt we still needed to utilize "outdoor, proper season" tegus. The later experiments were conducted by my friends/colleagues, who did such things as make models to subject to the same conditions and see what the temperature dynamics were like, as well as take tegus from the outdoors, and bring them indoors to see if they could keep their temperatures up. While we are quite certain we've definitely shown that they are in fact producing heat physiologically, our data also shows they are also using things like nesting material and grouping to help amplify these effects.
How they are doing it and exactly why is still up to speculation. It is likely a hormone that gets them to start ramping up their physiology during the night and we see this physically by an increased heart rate. It might be to promote egg production, but then that leaves the question of why males do it as well. There's still more work to be done....

 

[Jrock23]

Congrats... This was a very good read.. This can help a lot of people..

 

[Roadkill]

https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/science-ticker/tegu-lizards-warm-mating-season
https://www.newscientist.com/articl...izards-switch-on-mystery-heat-source-at-will/