Body temperature variation in free-living and food-deprived yellow-necked mice sustains an adaptive framework for endothermic thermoregulation

In many mammalian species, variation in body temperature (Tb) exceeds the values suitable for defining homeothermy, making it justifiable and even necessary to resort to the term “heterothermic”. However, Tb data are only available for ca. 1% of extant mammalian species. We investigated variations in Tb in wild free-living and experimentally food-deprived yellow-necked mice Apodemus flavicollis, during the temperate-zone autumn-winter period. In...