Unusual Desert Animal Survival Skills

We know that water is scarce in the desert regions, but have you ever wondered how the animals deal with that challenge?  Some animals have adapted over time to use odd and puzzling strategies to survive the dry climate and sweltering heat of the desert.

We can find the answers to these questions in the article, "Desert Animal Survival" which is written by a group the specializes in the outdoors in the Southwest. 

• “If that weren't enough, Kangaroo Rats, and some other desert rodents, actually manufacture their water metabolically from the digestion of dry seeds. These highly specialized desert mammals will not drink water even when it is given to them in captivity” (“Desert Animal Survival”).

• I found this excerpt from “Desert Animal Survival” very intriguing and it arose some questions for me. I found it very interesting how some rodents can actually create their own water, because for basically all other animals, they need to either drink pure water, or get moisture from plants or other foods. The fact that the author states that the seeds they eat are completely dry, and yet they don't drink normal water is very puzzling. I think that maybe as time went on, their climates and habitats got hotter and dryer, and eventually their bodies figured out a special way to keep them hydrated, but I still am not sure. I think this adaptation is very interesting and must be very helpful for the rodents who use it.

http://nature.ca/notebooks/images/img/153_p_0077_p.jpg 

• “New World vultures, such as the Turkey and Black Vultures, are dark in color and thus absorb considerable heat in the desert. But they excrete urine on their legs, cooling them by evaporation, and circulate the cooled blood back through the body. This behavior, called urohydrosis, is shared with their relatives the storks, successful birds of the African deserts” (“Desert Animal Survival”).

• When I read this passage I first thought it was disgusting how the vultures urinate on their legs to keep cool, but I figured that for them it is completely natural behavior. I thought it was interesting because I had never heard of that before and i didn't know that animals actually did that, because it is a very smart strategy. I thought it was also interesting how the blood gets circulated back through the body because the process seems more complex than it really is. A long time ago, the birds probably had no last resort to keep cool and decided to urinate on themselves and I guess their bodies just adapted to the change and worked in a new way to keep the bird cool.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/Ciconia_ciconia_-Tsavo_East_National_Park,_Kenya-8.jpg 

Question for further blog posts:

Why can't many animals adapt to different climates?