What is the importance of maintaining a constant body temperature in mammals?

It's very important to maintain the optimum body temperature in mammals, in particular in relation to enzymes and enzyme controlled processes. There will be the optimum temperature for enzymes where they work best at. If the temperature were to rise, this could lead to the denaturing of enzymes due to the disulphide, ionic and hydrogen bonds breaking. This changes the shape of the active site of the enzyme and means that an enzyme-substrate complex can't be formed. And so as a result you would see a decrease in enzyme activity. A decrease in temperature would result in lower kinetic energy and so you would see fewer enzyme-substrate collisions and so again a decrease in enzyme activity. And so this shows that in order to maintain optimum enzyme activity, we also have to maintain core body temperature. This is important as there are a lot of important processes in the body which are enzyme controlled such as respiration, highlighting the importance of homeostasis in maintaining core body temperature.