Fish have gills which enables them to live in water. What does aquatic plants have as compared to trees?
In: Biology
Unlike animals, plants need to take up CO2 and emit O2 (Animals do the opposite). However they still face some challenges underwater. Getting rid of excess O2 is easy (and sometimes looks really cool). Under normal circumstances the leaf cells produce O2 and it diffuses into the water. But if the plant is producing O2 fast enough, it does what is called “pearling”. Basically the excess gas bubbles out of pores in the leaves and produces a fine stream of tiny bubbles.
video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd6b906XcJ4
But plants underwater also need carbon dioxide. They are at a bit of an advantage here compared to animals….carbon dioxide dissolves _much_ more easily in water than oxygen does. Like 200x easier. Because the concentration of CO2 is higher underwater, plants don’t have to have specialized structures to extract it. However, underwater plants are still operating off of limited CO2 compared to plants with leaves in the air. People keeping aquatic aquarium plants often provide them with CO2 in order to make them grow more lushly, and plants that send up leaves out of the water almost always grow more quickly than totally submerged plants.
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