Page 121 - Engineering in Nature

Harun Yahya

The drawing to the side was based on a photograph
of a winter moth's body taken with an infra-red cam-
era, showing how heat is distributed in the insect's
body immediately after flight. Yellow represents the
highest temperature, followed—in order— by
red, pink, dark blue, light blue and in-
digo.

o
o
26,6 C - 30,9 C 1 3
o
o
24,8 C - 26,5 C
o
o
22,4 C - 24,7 C
o
o
19,6 C - 22,3 C
o
o
17,2 C - 19,5 C
14,0 C - 17,1 C
o
o
o
o
11,0 C - 13,9 C 2 4
In cold weather, winter moths warm themselves by beating their wings, contracting all
their wing muscles at the same time. The pictures at right show the distribution of heat
in a moth beginning to beat its wings, prior to flight. Pictures 1 and 2 represent infra-
red photographs taken from above, and 3 and 4 photographs taken from the side.
from the freezing winter cold, although these natural alcohol-based
anti-freezes also have some unwelcome side effects. The most impor-
tant drawback of these substances is that they are poisonous.
In living bodies, therefore, natural anti-freezes are turned into less
poisonous substances as a result of a series of biochemical processes.
Yet this is a very slow process. In particular, if the animal's body tem-
perature is low, it will take longer to throw off the lethargy caused by
the anti-freeze.

Adnan Oktar
119