when food and water are in limited supply. During the summer, when droughts are common in the desert environments where it lives, the Arabian oryx will drastically reduce its minimal fasting metabolic rate by lying completely inactive beneath shade trees during the day and ranging over smaller areas at night to forage. By letting its body temperature rise during the heat of the day, it uses less evaporative cooling and retains more body water, and at night, the cool night air lowers its temperature back to the normal range. The oryx’s arterial blood temperature is partly powered by a network of small arterial vessels with a large surface area called the rete mirabile, which branches from the two carotid arteries to the brain and allows for heat exchange between warm arterial blood and the cooler blood in the sinus cavities. Because of these changes in behaviour and physiology, it was shown that Arabian oryx can reduce their urine volume, faecal water loss, and resting metabolic rate by at least 50%, demonstrating how efficient these animals are at surviving in times when water and food are scarce. Importance to humans The Arabian oryx is the national animal of Jordan, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Qatar. The Arabian oryx is also the namesake of several businesses on the Arabian peninsula, notably Al Maha Airways and Al Maha Petroleum. In the King James Version of the Bible, the word re’em is translated as 'unicorn'. In Modern Hebrew, the name re'em laban, meaning white oryx, is used in error for the scimitar-horned oryxes living in the sanctuary Yotvata Hai Bar near Eilat. The scimitar oryx is called re'em Sahara. The Arabian name ri'ïm is the equivalent of the Hebrew name re'em, also meaning white oryx, suggesting a borrowing from the Early Modern Era. A Qatari oryx named "Orry" was chosen as the official games mascot for the 2006 Asian Games in Doha, and is shown on tailfins of planes belonging to Middle Eastern airline Qatar Airways. Unicorn myth The myth of the one-horned unicorn may be based on oryxes that have lost one horn. Aristotle and Pliny the Elder held that the oryx was the unicorn's "prototype". From certain angles, the oryx may seem to have one horn rather than two, and given that its horns are made from hollow bone that cannot be regrown, if an Arabian oryx were to lose