Abstract
The spadix of skunk cabbage, Symplocarpus foetidus, maintains an internal temperature of around 20oC even when the ambient air temperature drops to freezing. To understand the mechanism and the way of thermoregulation, detailed analyses of the temperatures of spadix and ambient air were made under field and artificial conditions. Based on a series of temperature measurements, temperature-triggered thermogenic oscillation in the spadix was discovered. The identified thermogenic oscillator had an accurate periodical cycle (ca. 60 min per cycle) that apparently responds to changes in the spadix temperature with a threshold of less than 0.5oC. These results suggest that periodical thermogenic oscillations may have a critical role in thermoregulation of the spadix. Based on these results, we propose a time-dependent thermogenic oscillatory model that acts as a precise thermal regulator under dynamic environmental temperature changes. This work was supported by a grant from the PROBRAIN.
