Now, primarily because of some shrewd researches of R.B. Cowles and Charles Bogert, carried out during the 1940’s, this idea has had to be abandoned. Reptiles are not at the mercy of the temperature of the milieu. If they were, they would achieve little, even by reptilian standards. Actually they can maintain a fair control over their blood temperature, and they do this not by controlling gain or loss of metabolic heat, but by moving around, by alternately seeking and avoiding sunlight or warm ground. They practice what is called behavioural temperature control, and some species, at least, maintain their preferred temperature at a remarkably steady level. Not much is known about temperatures in non-basking reptiles, such as those nocturnal or forest species that would seem shut off from any heat sources except the air or water around them. But the studies of Cowles and Bogert have provided the groundwork for a greatly broadened concept of the habitat of the terrestrial reptile.
Temperature and humidity are only two in a complex system of physical factors that a reptile has to reckon with—to tolerate, to seek or to escape from as it lives out its life. Even if we knew all about all these we should still not know very much about the habitat of the animal, because many of the important characteristics of the habitat—its demands and opportunities—are determined by the living things that share it with the creature on has in mind. Even animals and plants that only very briefly enter the range of a reptile’s activities may alter living conditions there.
To be continued…
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