According to a new study, animals are taking different actions under global warming. Some warm-blooded animals, such as birds, regulate their body temperature by changing the size and shape of their body parts. They do this to decrease its body temperature, which is called “shapeshifting”.
Parts of warm-blooded animals are getting more prominent beaks, ears, wings, and tails. A larger wing, ear, or tail in proportion to body size provides a larger surface area for smaller animals to lose excess heat.
A research team from Deakin University in Australia describes these changes in a review published in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution. They found several species of Australian parrot have shown, on average, a 4%-10% increase in bill size since 1871.
During the research process, technology-aided verification from the thermal imaging plays an important role in the shapeshifting of animals, revealing a new dimension analysis for scientific research.
Since infrared thermal imaging technology is a passive non-contact detection and recognition of targets, it is concealed and not easy to be discovered, making it easy to measure the body temperature of fast animals and observe the fierce ones at a safer place. The accurate temperature, temperature distribution, temperature difference can be retrieved fast, which provide reliable thermal information related to the growth, lesion and development of animals. Meanwhile, scientists are able to do researches effectively on wildlife population size, habitat change, population distribution, and more.
Take pigs as an example. once a pig is infected with a disease, it is often the first to manifest itself as "rising body temperature". If the diagnosis is made only by manual experience and the discovery is not timely, the loss will be unimaginable. The infrared thermal imager can be used to monitor the body temperature of pigs in real time for 24 hours. Once abnormal body temperature is found, an alarm will be triggered immediately, and the review will be performed as soon as possible to reduce the risk of large-scale infection.
