I mentioned waaaay back near the beginning that Selkie is cold blooded and needs heat regulation in colder seasons, but aside from that one mention in a non-comic side update there hasn’t been much visibility regarding Selkie’s need to regulate body temperature. Mostly because it hasn’t been a necessary bit to squeeze in to the larger arcs. But since we’re in short-mode anyway, I’d like to explore some of the little things Selkie’s been doing “off-camera” to regulate body temperature.
Phase 1: Hand warmers. LOTS of hand warmers.
I mentioned way back when that Selkie is cold blooded, but I also feel like from what we've seen so far, Selkie's temperature sensitivity must be somewhat more rugged than standard ectotherms. Otherwise she'd need to live in a glass cage with a heat stone and a big plastic wheel for exercise.
dave might want to invest in a zippo handwarmer they last much longer and use only zippo lighter fluid to run
Considering she’s got her own room now, I would assume she doesn’t have to share a thermostat?
Of course, she’d want to have a space heater on-hand as a backup, but still…
Interesting! Some mechanism kicks in when Selkie is swimming that keeps her warm- or at least, mitigates the effects of the cold. A chemical released by the ue of her gills?
Use! The use of her gills.
And I’m Dondonesque, damnit!
(Sigh) I’ve not been well recently…
Using gills would cool her down even faster. Water carries away heat much more rapidly than air does. Breathing through gills would put her in thermal equilibrium with the water VERY quickly
Some life forms use counter flow blood to keep themselves warm. Basically, warm core blood on its way to a surface (where it will be cooled down) is routed through arteries running next to veins carrying already cooled blood from those areas, the outgoing blood exchanges its heat with the incoming blood so it no longer has warmth to lose at the surface and the returning blood gets warmed up before it gets back to the core.
BTW, the mechanism for this is called “rete mirabile.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rete_mirabile
So Selkie rule: Sun + jacket weather = she should be fine as long as she’s in the sun. No sun + jacket weather or colder= too cold to maintain a will to live.
Sounds like Selkie is from Florida.
No no no… Florida is where old people go to die. She’s too young to be from there. (In my defense, it was my great aunt who told me that when I asked why she didn’t want to be closer to the family.)
Nah, that’s Arizona. We all shrivel up and die when the clouds roll in.
Am I the only one who noticed that the box says “do not eat” at the bottom? lol you know that;s funny… they wouldn’t have put a warning “do not eat” unless someone had already tried to do it….
If she uses the sunlight to generate core heat then her functional season might run from the spring equinox to the fall equinox, with the 21st of June the peak time when she can use the sun’s rays to help her metabolism. If she is actually an alien immigrant she could very easily use the light to generate heat, the same way that plants use it to create sugar.
If she uses the sun’s heat her peak time would be July or August the same like any human summer-worshipper.
But it is also possible that she uses her own kinetic energy to produce personal heat – being in water lower than your body temperature can cool you down mighty fast but if you are a really serious swimmer you like the coldest swimming water possible, colder than they now keep swimming pools. Long distance endurance swimming, or repeated speed and agility swimming is one of the most intensive exercises available and can generate massive amounts of heat. (I know an endurance swimmer who had to give up the sport in the 1980’s because they raised the temperature at the pools and he would warm up too much.)
I am going to go out on a limb and guess that she would use a combination of all three. Avoiding torpidity is an important enough function that Selkie-kind would more likely have evolved with back-up systems for heat generation, and as promptly as cultural discoveries allowed would also have come up with technological solutions.
So… how much would a diver’s wet suit cost, if it was rated for Arctic diving, child sized, and had some special customizations around the rib-cage area? I believe an Arctic wet suit is properly called a dry-suit, and the best ones are made for the Norwegian Navy, but they unfortunately don’t enlist eight-year-old midshipmen… With a new one required a minimum of every six months to allow for growing, I am thinking those sneakers Selkie got are just the first of some prodigiously expensive purchases Todd is going to make…
There’s also Gigantothermy (sometimes called ectothermic homeothermy). “This is a phenomenon with significance in biology and paleontology, whereby large, bulky ectothermic animals are more easily able to maintain a constant, relatively high body temperature than smaller animals by virtue of their smaller surface area to volume ratio. A bigger animal has proportionately less of its body close to the outside environment than a smaller animal of otherwise similar shape, and so it gains heat from, or loses heat to, the environment much more slowly.”
Dave, in your transcript, are you saying that she is an endo-therm? That’s how it appears to me. Endotherms are warm blooded. We use our interior body functions to regulate our temperature – shivering, sweating, panting, etc. Exotherms rely on exterior heat. They are cold blooded
I just got the two terms mixed-up. >_<
Query. Is Selkie truly cold blooded, or just has cold blooded traits? Because, if I am remembering correctly, cold blooded critters eat only once every few days, while Selkie…. Selkie and her love of food is amazing.
She’s a KID. Kids eat everything in SIGHT. There are days when I literally can’t put enough food on the table for there to be any leftovers for my wife (she works late.)
I think the point of being cold-blooded is that your metabolism doesn’t regulate your temperature.
Trust. There are children ages 16, 12, and 4 in this house. I know EXACTLY what you mean. (Leftovers? What are those? Oh, you mean that extra pot of chili was so you might have something to take for lunch tomorrow? We just thought it was seconds or thirds. Sorry about that.)
So it is more like a situation where she could get by without eating as much, but food is delish, and why do that if you have to?
And even most baby reptiles like to eat every day. We have a Red-Eared Slider and when she was a hatchling she ate a prodigious amount.
Awesome to know. =) My scaly friends were always a bit older… I don’t remember much about them because Iggy and Blue died over ten years ago. =(
Selkie appears more fish then reptile, though, and I’ve never had a fish that needed to eat less then once a day.
Another factor playing into her high tolerance for temperature swings (for an ectotherm, at least) might be that she’s simply big. Even ectotherms generate waste body heat, but most of them are so small that it doesn’t really do much to keep them at an ideal temperature. A creature Selkie’s size, though, is beginning to get large enough that simple gigantothermy (basically, being large enough that one’s own bulk traps heat and prevents body temperature from swinging rapidly) might be enough to keep her body temperature reasonably steady. She’s no leatherback, great white, or sauropod, of course, but even so she’s probably going to be more resilient to short-term shifts in temperature than, say, an iguana or smaller animal would be.
Panel four. I remember my daughter given me that look. She had mastered sarcasm at an early age. Grandma never was able to figure out the subtleties of sarcasm and my daughter took full advantage.
My daughter has grown up to study biology and keeps a bearded dragon. She has told me (and wiki confirms) that cold and warm blooded are not discrete states. Some fish (swordfish and sharks, for example) exhibit warm-blooded characteristics. Some mammals (such as bats) exhibit characteristics of cold-bloodedness. Since we are here talking about mer-people, anything might go.
I was just thinking: despite her dislike for the gift, socks would make an exceptionally good gift for someone who displays exothermic traits…
No way a cold blooded creature can function like a human! The brain alone wants so much energy.
Yeah, but so called “cold blooded creatures” don’t actually have cold blood. Selkie is really an Exotherm – with “exo” meaning outside or external. The real body temperature of an exotherm can be cold, hot or inbetween.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ectotherm
I see more expensive purchases in Todd’s future.
High quality ski jacket or one-piece, $150-400. Bliisful warmth, priceless.
Seriously, the higher the quality, the better the warmth. My daughter’s gear proves this out.
I don’t think that, by itself, would help. Your daughter, being warm-blooded, gives off heat. Warm clothing is not itself “warm”, but instead traps the heat being given off by your body and keeps it next to you. Selkie, being cold-blooded, would not give off heat, so warm clothing would do no good. The chemical heat packs – an external heat supply – that they just brought it would do it.
Now, if she has warm clothing AND the heat pack, with the pack producing the heat and the clothing keeping it next to her, that should work.
“Cold-blooded” creatures generate heat from metabolic activity just like “warm-blooded’ creatures. The difference is that “warm-blooded” creatures (like us) have a mechanism for generating extra heat to maintain a constant body temperature (and a system to regulate that). So really good cold weather clothing really would help Selkie. She would need warmer clothing than a human child of the same size, but the difference would probably not be that extreme.
There are jackets with built in electric heaters. Same idea as her electric blanket.
Those jackets are a God-send.
I understand, Selkie. The cold makes me sleepy too. At work the other day, I was sitting at the information desk right by the door and I was falling asleep till someone gave me a sweater.
See, it’s the heat that does me in. Colder is better for me.
… Which blows when your office is in a 50+ year old cinderblock barracks in full sun, and everything is connected via the base HVAC system, which means AC gets killed for heating based on the date, not what the weather is like outside.
Y’know. I’m pretty sure Selkie would love to have my office as a room on sunny winter days. Seriously. I’ll trade.
I can’t believe no one has said this yet: Selkie has to be the only kid in the universe who WANTS socks for Christmas!
I could be wrong here, but I interpreted it as Selkie saying winter sucks, so he says Even Christmas? And she’s saying that sucks when she gets socks.
I had a moment where I thought she wanted socks, until I read it again. Now I’m sort of the same opinion as Roxily.
“Winter is craps.”
“What about Christmas?”
“Christmas is only craps when I get SOCKS.”
Remember when we met Selkie she was running around the orphanage barefoot. Socks are craps.
Socks probably suck for Selkie. Narrow toe area and all that. I bet they bunch in all the wrong places, and constrict at the tips, and get holes in them from her pointy flippers on the taut fabric. Not cool!
We just got more snow today (what we got earlier melted away) and despite it making things slippery, it also made do a little happy dance. That said, having experienced some days when it just feels like you can’t get warm (which tend to happen when it’s not below freezing, but just above, and wet), a hot bath is often needed to make you feel like an endotherm. If Selkie’s gills can deal with tap water, she’d probably love a (human) body temperature bath every day, or twice a day, like when she’s been outside.
Ain’t buying it. Let’s assume she’s from temperate waters. If she’s poikilothermic and aquatic she’ll be adapted to living in a cold medium which drains away heat faster than air does. Sunlight doesn’t penetrate far. She will probably do much better in normally cold weather than you or I.
And things like woolly socks won’t help because she’s not generating excess heat like a mammal would. There’s a reason fish don’t have fur.
I love your avatar. Very context-appropriate. 😀
I do my *ribbit* humble best
At the most cold will slow her down. But she won’t shiver or experience it the same way we homeotherms do