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In some fish, capillary blood flows in the opposite direction to the water, causing countercurrent exchange. The muscles on the sides of the pharynx push the oxygen-depleted water out the gill openings. In bony fish, the pumping of oxygen-poor water is aided by a bone that surrounds the gills called the operculum. [6]
Ribs are generally absent, so the lungs are filled by buccal pumping and a frog deprived of its lungs can maintain its body functions without them. [69] The fully aquatic Bornean flat-headed frog (Barbourula kalimantanensis) is the first frog known to lack lungs entirely. [72] Frogs have three-chambered hearts, a feature they share with lizards.
Free oxygen is produced in the biosphere through photolysis (light-driven oxidation and splitting) of water during photosynthesis in cyanobacteria, green algae, and plants. During oxidative phosphorylation in cellular respiration, oxygen is reduced to water, thus closing the biological water-oxygen redox cycle.
The lungs of most frogs and other amphibians are simple and balloon-like, with gas exchange limited to the outer surface of the lung. This is not very efficient, but amphibians have low metabolic demands and can also quickly dispose of carbon dioxide by diffusion across their skin in water, and supplement their oxygen supply by the same method.
In fish a countercurrent flow (lower diagram) of blood and water in the gills is used to extract oxygen from the environment. [56] [57] [58] Fig. 23 The respiratory mechanism in bony fish. The inhalatory process is on the left, the exhalatory process on the right. The movement of water is indicated by the blue arrows. Oxygen is poorly soluble ...
[100] [101] Lungs and swim bladders are homologous (descended from a common ancestral form) as is the case for the pulmonary artery (which delivers de-oxygenated blood from the heart to the lungs) and the arteries that supply swim bladders. [102] Air was introduced into the lungs by a process known as buccal pumping. [103] [104]
Amphibians use their skin as a secondary respiratory interface and some small terrestrial salamanders and frogs lack lungs and rely entirely on their skin. They are superficially similar to reptiles like lizards, but unlike reptiles and other amniotes, require access to water bodies to breed.
Gas exchange is the physical process by which gases move passively by diffusion across a surface. For example, this surface might be the air/water interface of a water body, the surface of a gas bubble in a liquid, a gas-permeable membrane, or a biological membrane that forms the boundary between an organism and its extracellular environment.