Winter thermoregulation of free-ranging Ethiopian hedgehogs (Paraechinus aethiopicus) in Qatar

Biologists focus on thermoregulation of desert mammals in terms of how they minimise heat gain during hotter months, and put less effort on how they maximise heat gain during cooler months. Heat gain may contribute to energy savings of desert mammals during cooler period when the ambient temperature in desert is substantially lower than their body temperatures. We investigated the thermoregulation in free-ranging Ethiopian hedgehogs, Paraechinus aethiopicus, during winter using radio-telemetry in Qatar. Temperatures detected by the tag attached to hedgehogs were significantly higher than ambient temperatures throughout the day, and the difference was more extreme during the mid-day. We also observed several hedgehogs basking with their radio-tags exposed to direct sunlight. It is possible that basking is beneficial for the hedgehog's winter thermoregulation in the desert where plenty of solar radiation is available.qscienc

ASTE Observations of Warm Gas in Low-mass Protostellar Envelopes: Different Kinematics between Submillimeter and Millimeter Lines

With the ASTE telescope, we have made observations of three low-mass protostellar envelopes around L483, B335, and L723 in the submillimeter CS ($J$=7--6) and HCN ($J$=4--3) lines. We detected both the CS and HCN lines toward all the targets, and the typical CS intensity ($\sim$ 1.0 K in T$_{B}$) is twice higher than that of the HCN line. Mapping observations of L483 in these lines have shown that the submillimeter emissions in the low-mass protostellar envelope are resolved, exhibit a western extension from the central protostar, and that the deconvolved size is $\sim$ 5500 AU $\times$ 3700 AU (P.A. = 78$^{\circ}$) in the HCN emission. The extent of the submillimeter emissions in L483 implies the presence of higher-temperature ($\gtrsim$ 40 K) gas at 4000 AU away from the central protostar, which suggests that we need to take 2-dimensional radiative transfer models with a flattened disklike envelope and bipolar cavity into account to explain the temperature structure inside the low-mass protostellar envelope. The position-velocity diagrams of these submillimeter lines in L483 and B335 exhibit different velocity gradients from those found in the previous millimeter observations. In particular, along the axis of the associated molecular outflow the sense of the velocity gradient traced by the submillimeter lines is opposite to that of the millimeter observations or the associated molecular outflow, both in L483 and B335. We suggest that expanding gas motions at the surface of the flattened disklike envelope around the protostar, which is irradiated from the central star directly, are the origin of the observed submillimeter velocity structure.Comment: 20 pages, 11 figure