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Diving birds and pelagic seabirds breath air using lungs like reptiles and mammals, but avian lungs are fairly rigid structures that do not expand and contract as elastically. Instead, the structures that act as bellows that ventilate the lungs are the avascular air sacs , which are distributed throughout much of the birds' bodies [ 9 ] and ...
Bony fish are more closely related to terrestrial vertebrates, which evolved out of a clade of bony fishes that breathe through their skin or lungs, than they are to the sharks, rays, and the other cartilaginous fish. Their kind of gill respiration is shared by the "fishes" because it was present in their common ancestor and lost in the other ...
Fish from multiple groups can live out of the water for extended time periods. Amphibious fish such as the mudskipper can live and move about on land for up to several days, or live in stagnant or otherwise oxygen depleted water. Many such fish can breathe air via a variety of mechanisms. The skin of anguillid eels may absorb oxygen directly.
The microscopic structure of a gill presents a large surface area to the external environment. Branchia ( pl. : branchiae) is the zoologists' name for gills (from Ancient Greek βράγχια ). With the exception of some aquatic insects , the filaments and lamellae (folds) contain blood or coelomic fluid , from which gases are exchanged ...
In practice, fish anatomy and fish physiology complement each other, the former dealing with the structure of a fish, its organs or component parts and how they are put together, such as might be observed on the dissecting table or under the microscope, and the latter dealing with how those components function together in living fish.
Some protists accomplish this using contractile vacuoles, while freshwater fish excrete excess water via the kidney. [4] Although most aquatic organisms have a limited ability to regulate their osmotic balance and therefore can only live within a narrow range of salinity, diadromous fish have the ability to migrate between fresh and saline ...
A terrifying breed of fish could migrate to Australia. Native to south-east Asia, this fish has strong spines on its pectoral fins that enable its body to "walk" across dry land.
The majority of marine gastropods breathe through a single gill, supplied with oxygen by a current of water through the mantle cavity. This current is U-shaped, so that it also flushes waste products away from the anus , which is located above the animal's head, and would otherwise cause a problem with fouling.