Introduction
Environment is critical for all ecosystems to survive on earth. Therefore, any living species surviving on earth must possess inherent abilities to cope with the ever-changing environment.
Recent climate change projections are quite alarming for any sector including livestock. The animals possess inherent abilities to cope with environmental stress but while doing so they mostly compromise their productive responses. Hence, it is very important to study the animal physiology associated with environmental sciences as this will help us to understand the intervening point to improve livestock production in the prospective climate change scenario.Ecology is the division of biology that deals with the interactions between living things and their biophysical environment which comprised of living and non-living components. Ecology comprises many aspects of biodiversity, production and biomass, distribution of population in addition to competition between them within and among ecosystems. Whereas, animal ecology refers to the association of individuals with their environments, in addition to physical elements and living things, and the importance of these associations for evolution, population growth and regulation, interactions between species, the composition of biological communities, and energy flow and nutrient cycling through the ecosystem. In the event of domestic animals, ecology comprises their association with human society and economy, and especially concern with their productivity. Ecology is divided into two branches as autecology and synecology, where autecology, also known as species ecology, describes the association of a single species with the living and non-living aspects of its environment. Autecology is principally dealing with the quantifiable variables like light, humidity, and available nutrients so as to study the necessities, life history and behaviour of the organism or species at experimental conditions.
The current advancement in laboratory techniques and technological developments has empowered physiologists to learn physiological variables in free living animals, in addition to laboratory experiments. Whole-animal physiology/physiological ecology/environ- mental physiology is the study of animals within their natural habitat. Environmental physiologists primarily focus on studying and understanding the animal’s function along with their response to environment at different stages of life. Overall development in the life sciences with recent molecular biological techniques facilitates the environmental physiologists to study substantial differences in animal physiology within and between species to understand the mechanisms and their gene regulations.Environment refers to the kind of habitat or surroundings of a living organism which include both the biotic and abiotic factors, which leads to the development and growth of the organism along with risk and impairment. Each species has a precisely defined environment within a biome in the totality of all the external factors it experiences. The behavioural choices opted by an organism, along with its absolute presence, modify its environment. The microenvironment or microhabitats or microclimate is dealt with environmental and evolutionary physiology. The individual animal selects a range of its environment where to spend its time, feed and rest. These opportunities are changed on a magnificent spatial scale with a quick temporal scale for small animals and it takes much more coarsely for large animals. Climate can be referred as a long-term (over 30 years) average condition of the meteorological variables of a particular region. Thirty years is the standard time period for well execution of statistics which was suggested by the world meteorological organization. Therefore, climate change refers to variations in the climate for a long course of time which reappears with regular time interval, but is not strictly periodic. The existence of a pattern without any real precision in the recurrence of events is termed as climatic cycle (climatic oscillation). Macroclimate refers to the climatic condition over a larger area. Mesoclimate refers to the climatic conditions over smaller areas, which may not be representative of the general climate while the microclimate refers to the climatic conditions directly surrounding the animal.
28.2