Homeostasis: Encyclopedia II - Homeostasis - Biological homeostasis

Homeostasis - Biological homeostasis

Homeostasis is one of the fundamental characteristics of living things. It is the maintenance of the internal environment within tolerable limits.

The internal environment of a living organism's body features body fluids in multicellular animals. The body fluids include blood plasma, tissue fluid and intracellular fluid. The maintenance of a steady state in these fluids is essential to living things as the lack of it harms the genetic material.

With regard to any parameter, an organism may be a conformer or a regulator. Regulators try to maintain the parameter at a constant level, regardless of what is happening in its environment. Conformers allow the environment to determine the parameter. For instance, endothermic animals maintain a constant body temperature, while ectothermic animals exhibit wide variation in body temperature.

This is not to say that conformers may not have behavioral adaptations that allow them to exert some control over the parameter in question. For instance, reptiles often sit on sun-heated rocks in the morning to raise their body temperatures.

An advantage of homeostatic regulation is that it allows the organism to function more effectively. For instance, ectotherms tend to become sluggish at low temperatures, whereas endotherms are as active as always. On the other hand, regulation requires energy. One reason snakes are able to eat just once a week is that they use much less energy for maintaining homeostasis.

Homeostasis - Homeostasis in the human body

All sorts of factors affect the suitability of the human body fluids to sustain life; these include properties like temperature, salinity, and acidity, and the concentrations of nutrients such as glucose, various ions, oxygen, and wastes, such as carbon dioxide and urea. Since these properties affect the chemical reactions that keep bodies alive, there are built-in physiological mechanisms to maintain them at desirable levels.

However, it should be noted that homeostasis is not the reason for these ongoing unconscious adjustments. Homeostasis should be thought of as a general characterization of many normal processes in concert, not their proximal cause per se. Moreover, there are numerous biological phenomena which do not conform to this model, such as anabolism.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Biological homeostasis", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki