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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.
Jaws allow fish to eat a wide variety of food, including plants and other organisms. Fish ingest food through the mouth and break it down in the esophagus . In the stomach, food is further digested and, in many fish, processed in finger-shaped pouches called pyloric caeca , which secrete digestive enzymes and absorb nutrients.
A fish's hypoxia tolerance can be represented in different ways. A commonly used representation is the critical O 2 tension (P crit), which is the lowest water O 2 tension (P O 2) at which a fish can maintain a stable O 2 consumption rate (M O 2). [2] A fish with a lower P crit is therefore thought to be more hypoxia-tolerant than a fish with a ...
Fluid balance is an aspect of the homeostasis of organisms in which the amount of water in the organism needs to be controlled, via osmoregulation and behavior, such that the concentrations of electrolytes (salts in solution) in the various body fluids are kept within healthy ranges.
Thus, to Barcroft homeostasis was not only organized by the brain—homeostasis served the brain. [13] Homeostasis is an almost exclusively biological term, referring to the concepts described by Bernard and Cannon, concerning the constancy of the internal environment in which the cells of the body live and survive.
Like the general biological notion of homeostasis, elemental homeostasis refers to the maintenance of elemental composition within some biologically ordered range. Photoautotrophic organisms, such as algae and vascular plants , can exhibit a very wide range of physiological plasticity in elemental composition and thus have relatively weak ...
Plant ecophysiology is concerned largely with two topics: mechanisms (how plants sense and respond to environmental change) and scaling or integration (how the responses to highly variable conditions—for example, gradients from full sunlight to 95% shade within tree canopies—are coordinated with one another), and how their collective effect on plant growth and gas exchange can be ...
In very small animals, plants and bacteria, simple diffusion of gaseous metabolites is sufficient for respiratory function and no special adaptations are found to aid respiration. Passive diffusion or active transport are also sufficient mechanisms for many larger aquatic animals such as many worms , jellyfish , sponges , bryozoans and similar ...