Adaptations in Desert Animals

Plant and animal bodies are made up of a number of complex biological processes. These processes can take place within a narrow range of temperatures. If the range is exceeded the organism dies. The problem with the desert regions is that temperatures reach extreme limits. Adding to the problem of extreme temperature is the scarcity of water in the desert. Water is the major constituents of the living bodies. To survive such harsh conditions, desert animals have developed certain features that have enabled them to survive in the desert.

Adaptations in Desert Animals

Adaptations that the desert animals have undergone are for attaining the following purposes:

• To Avoid Heat
  Most of the desert animals avoid being out in the sun during the hottest part of the day. Many desert mammals, reptiles and amphibians live in burrows to escape the intense desert heat. Rodents also plug the entrance of their burrows to keep the hot and dry desert winds out. Most of the animals of the desert either come out during the early morning or in the evening. Some of them like snakes, foxes and most rodents are nocturnal. They sleep during the daytime in their burrows or dens and hunt only during the night when the temperatures are low. Certain animals like the Round-tailed Ground Squirrel restore to estivation when they slow down their metabolism to conserve water and energy when the days become very hot.
• To Dissipate Heat
  Due to constant exposure to high temperatures, desert animals need to maintain their body temperatures at an optimum level so that the various processes that are important for their survival can be carried on. For this reason, some of them have developed long body parts that provide greater body surface to dissipate heat. For example, jackrabbits have large ears that are supplied with a large number of blood vessels from which excess heat can be easily lost. It is a known fact that light colors are better absorbers of heat than dark colors. Most desert animals are pale in color. This prevents their bodies from absorbing more heat from the Sun. However, turkeys and black vultures are dark in color and hence they absorb considerable amount of heat during the day. To prevent their bodies from getting overheated, they have evolved the process of urohydrosis. In this process, they urinate on their legs that have numerous blood vessels. As the urine evaporates it absorbs the heat from the blood in the blood vessels of the legs.
• To Absorb Water
  In deserts where water is scarce, plants like cactus are a main source of water. These succulent plants have developed their own ways of storing water to help them tide through the dry days of the desert. Certain insects also depend upon nectar from flowers and sap from stems to get water. Kangaroo rats are known to be able to manufacture water by some metabolic process from the digestion of dry seeds. Many rodents of the desert have extra tubules in their kidneys that help them to extract most of the water from their urine and return it to the bloodstream. They also filter the moisture out of their their exhaled breath through specialized organs in their nasal cavities.
• To Preserve Water
  Animals like the Gila Monster is known to store water in the fatty tissues in their tails and other parts of the body. Also, the hump of the camel has fatty tissue. When this fatty tissue is metabolized, it produces both energy as well as water. Desert animals like reptiles have minimized loss of water by excreting waste in the form of an insoluble white compound uric acid. This adaptation ensures very little wastage of water. Most of the scavengers and the predators have evolved ways of extracting water from the food that they eat.

These are just a few examples of the amazing adaptations that the desert animals have evolved to survive the extreme conditions of the desert. Without these adaptations of the animals, the deserts would have been absolutely lifeless with no living creature or thing around.