Stenothermal

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. an organism that cannot tolerate a wide range of temperatures and thrives only within narrow thermal limits
2. a creature restricted to survival in environments with little temperature variation
3. an animal unable to adapt to significant changes in ambient temperature conditions

Etymology: "Stenothermal" is a plain scientific compound, built from two Greek-derived pieces. The first, "steno-", comes from Greek "stenos", meaning narrow or confined. The second, "thermal", comes from Greek "thermos", meaning hot or warm, and reaches English through the Latin-influenced "thermalis" in the sense of relating to heat. Put together, the word describes an organism confined to a narrow band of temperatures. The pattern is a modern one. Biologists coined it by analogy with "eurythermal", where "eury-" means wide, so the pair sets a broad tolerance for temperature against a narrow one. The term is used of creatures such as many cold-water fish and certain tropical corals, which can survive only within a small temperature range. The prefix "steno-" appears in other scientific coinages too, such as "stenohaline" for organisms that tolerate only narrow salinity ranges.