Abstract
The spadix of skunk cabbage, Symplocarpus foetidus, is capable to maintaining an internal temperature of around 20oC even when the ambient temperature drops below freezing. Although it has been assumed that such a homeothermic behavior in S. foetidus involves successive mitochondrial respiratory control, the mechanism that governs thermoregulation has been poorly investigated. To elucidate the mechanism required for the homeothermic heat-production in S. foetidus, we conducted a series of theoretical and experimental analyses under various environmental conditions. Our analysis revealed that the temperature of the thermogenic spadix displayed a typical chaotic character, and the embedding dimension of the chaotic system was found to be at least two. These observations suggest that the homeothermic heat-production in S. foetidus can be simply implicated by efflux and influx models using two major pools of metabolic intermediates.
