why are dolphins and other sea mammals able to deal with seawater whereas any seamen would rather die of thirst than drinking only one cup of saltwater

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What is there essential difference? Is there some kind of filter and if so, where and how does it work?
And what about other fish? Do they employ the same mechanism? And seaweed and stuff?
My basic understanding of living cells says that much salt does much harm, therefore as far as I’m concerned, there should be no living cell in the whole wide ocean.
Also interesting: how do eg salmons perform the transition between sweetwater river courses and their long mating routes across the ocean?

In: Biology

5 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Although it’s literally all water, many of the animals in the ocean treat it a lot more like a desert.

The water is too salty to ingest in large quantities, and it’s constantly trying to dehydrate your tissues through osmotic pressure. The struggle in that environment isn’t really that different from a desert animal.

So like a desert animal, fish and oceangoing mammals must conserve their body moisture and source new water from their diet instead of from the environment. They expel most of the saltwater they ingest when eating, and have very powerful kidneys to deal with the rest.

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