If I shrunk myself and went to live underground what changes in my body would need to take place?

Question

If I shrunk my body to live undergound what physiological adaptaions would need to take place with my still human form body in order to survive as still a happy and healthy person? Consider body temperature, metabolism, heart rate, etc.

Answer 1

Your eyesight would need to adapt to the lower light levels, although you'd probably find yourself getting lonely and missing your psychiatrist.

Answer 2

If a human become small enough that the surface to volume ratio of the body is less than about 3:1 the body would loose heat faster than it could resupply from processing food. This is still larger than a shrew or hummingbird. Shrews do not leave the protected environment of the leaf litter, ever. Hummingbirds have a form of hibernation each night when they rest.
Smaller than a shrew and the creature can not be exothermic, warmblooded. This why there are many small fish, reptiles, insects, crustaceans, etc that metabolize at the ambient temperature. They need less food to live on. However warmblooded predators like shrews can move more quickly at low temperatures than their prey. They are extremely competent hunters.
To be that small pale coloring and very small, thick extremities help control heat loss. Arctic foxes have tiny, thickly furred ears while tropic foxes have enormous, nearly hairless ears to radiate excess heat.
A rabbit sized person would need short stumpy arms and legs, no toes. Fingers would have to have counter current blood flow like water bird legs. Think dwarfism.
Living underground helps because the soil temperatures vary much less than the air.
Being very fat all over, especially the skull, would be helpful but no sweating needed.
The shrew consumes about 25 times what the elephant does per gram body mass. So they eat almost constantly.
Shrews weigh 3-15g. They are adapted to survival at that size, so that is much smaller than the human body, in a vaguely recognizably human form, could be reduced to. Shrews are at about 1:3 ratio (surface:volume)
So lets say a reasonable lower limit for a primate- like form would be a body ratio of 3:1 [Tree-shrews run 1:1 with a weight of 150g or 1/3 pound]
When living underground eyes are not useful but whiskers or other sensory adaptations would help.

What is most interesting is that a bacterium, which is not closely related to an elephant in an evolutionary sense, consumes approximately the same energy per unit body mass as the elephant. This implies the elephant is far more effective in overcoming the physical limitations imposed on them by their external environment by adapting their own physical properties in order to obtain optimal, biochemical characteristics, such as the mass-specific metabolic rate.
The shrew is at the very limit of size a mammal can assume yet survive the environment.

Answer 3

Mmmm.. nicely in case you lived in the sky, you will be able to desire to look down at like incredibly lots each and everything..yet once you reside underground, it may be incredibly cool considering which you will be a meerkat and make tunnels!

Answer 4

What type of drugs are you smoking while watching to many sci-fi movies their fella?The only people I know living underground are usally considered rigor mortis avius corpus,in other words DEAD.

Answer 5

grow lots of hair on your body to keep warm, grow whiskers to see in the dark, have a very fatty diet to help with starvation, increase your heart rate to keep warmer

Answer 6

camouflage and a good weaponry system for defense against predators. you might want to consider becoming poisonous.

Answer 7

your heart beat would probably be super fast like a mouse

Answer 8

hopefully your organs would shrink too or you will be hurting like hell. Ha Ha

Answer 9

try acid. you wont even have to think about changes,

Answer 10

dude.......you're nuts