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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]
In OMZs oxygen concentration drops to levels <10 nM at the base of the oxycline and can remain anoxic for over 700 m depth. [7] This lack of oxygen can be reinforced or increased due to physical processes changing oxygen supply such as eddy-driven advection, [7] sluggish ventilation, [8] increases in ocean stratification, and increases in ocean temperature which reduces oxygen solubility.
Secondly, ocean deoxygenation occurs also in the open ocean. In that part of the ocean, there is nowadays an ongoing reduction in oxygen levels. As a result, the naturally occurring low oxygen areas (so called oxygen minimum zones (OMZs)) are now expanding slowly. [4] This expansion is happening as a consequence of human caused climate change.
In deep water systems (e.g. oceans), water can be out of contact with the atmosphere for extremely long periods of time (years, decades, centuries) and large positive AOU values are typical. On occasion, where near-surface primary production has raised oxygen concentrations above saturation, negative AOU values are possible (i.e. oxygen has not ...
Dissolved oxygen levels required by various species in the Chesapeake Bay (US). In aquatic environments, oxygen saturation is a ratio of the concentration of "dissolved oxygen" (DO, O 2), to the maximum amount of oxygen that will dissolve in that water body, at the temperature and pressure which constitute stable equilibrium conditions.
In response to decreasing dissolved oxygen level in the environment, fish swim up to the surface of the water column and ventilate at the top layer of the water where it contains relatively higher level of dissolved oxygen, a behavior called aquatic surface respiration (ASR). [33]
Many organisms require hypoxic conditions. Oxygen is poisonous to anaerobic bacteria for example. [3] Oxygen depletion is typically expressed as a percentage of the oxygen that would dissolve in the water at the prevailing temperature and salinity. A system with low concentration—in the range between 1 and 30% saturation—is called hypoxic ...
Photosynthetic prokaryotic organisms that produced O 2 as a byproduct lived long before the first build-up of free oxygen in the atmosphere, [5] perhaps as early as 3.5 billion years ago. The oxygen cyanobacteria produced would have been rapidly removed from the oceans by weathering of reducing minerals, [citation needed] most notably ferrous ...