Osmoregulation
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Osmoregulation is the active regulation of the osmotic pressure of an organism's body fluids, detected by osmoreceptors, to maintain the homeostasis of the organism's water content; that is, it maintains the fluid balance and the concentration of electrolytes (salts in solution which in this case is represented by body fluid) to keep the body fluids from becoming too diluted or concentrated. Osmotic pressure is a measure of the tendency of water to move into one solution from another by osmosis.[1] The higher the osmotic pressure of a solution, the more water tends to move into it. Pressure must be exerted on the hypertonic side of a selectively permeable membrane to prevent diffusion of water by osmosis from the side containing pure water.
Although there may be hourly and daily variations in osmotic balance, an animal is generally in an osmotic steady state over the long term. Organisms in aquatic and terrestrial environments must maintain the right concentration of
Regulators and conformers
Two major types of osmoregulation are osmoconformers and osmoregulators.
Organisms that maintain an internal
Some marine fish, like sharks, have adopted a different, efficient mechanism to conserve water, i.e., osmoregulation. They retain urea in their blood in relatively higher concentration. Urea damages living tissues so, to cope with this problem, some fish retain
In plants
While there are no specific osmoregulatory organs in higher
Plants share with animals the problems of obtaining water but, unlike in animals, the loss of water in plants is crucial to create a driving force to move nutrients from the soil to tissues. Certain plants have evolved methods of water conservation.
Mesophytes are plants living in lands of temperate zone, which grow in well-watered soil. They can easily compensate the water lost by transpiration through absorbing water from the soil. To prevent excessive transpiration they have developed a waterproof external covering called cuticle.
In animals
Humans
Marine mammals
Drinking is not common behavior in
Teleosts
In teleost (advanced ray-finned) fishes, the gills, kidney and digestive tract are involved in maintenance of body fluid balance, as the main osmoregulatory organs. Gills in particular are considered the primary organ by which ionic concentration is controlled in marine teleosts.
Unusually, the
In protists
In bacteria
Vertebrate excretory systems
Waste products of the nitrogen metabolism
Ammonia is a toxic by-product of protein metabolism and is generally converted to less toxic substances after it is produced then excreted; mammals convert ammonia to urea, whereas birds and reptiles form uric acid to be excreted with other wastes via their cloacas.
Achieving osmoregulation in vertebrates
Four processes occur:
- filtration – fluid portion of blood (plasma) is filtered from a nephron (functional unit of vertebrate kidney) structure known as the glomerulus into Bowman's capsule or glomerular capsule (in the kidney's cortex) and flows down the proximal convoluted tubule to a "u-turn" called the Loop of Henle (loop of the nephron) in the medulla portion of the kidney.
- reabsorption – most of the viscous glomerular filtrate is returned to blood vessels that surround the convoluted tubules.
- secretion – the remaining fluid becomes urine, which travels down collecting ducts to the medullary region of the kidney.
- excretion – the urine (in mammals) is stored in the urinary bladder and exits via the urethra; in other vertebrates, the urine mixes with other wastes in the cloaca before leaving the body (frogs also have a urinary bladder).
See also
- Euryhaline
- Halotolerance
- Osmoconformer
- Osmotic concentration
- Salt gland
- Stenohaline
- Tissue hydration
References
- E. Solomon, L. Berg, D. Martin, Biology 6th edition. Brooks/Cole Publishing. 2002