Wegner is a fisheries biologist at NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla. He first became aware that opah were unlike other fish when a colleague, Owyn Snodgrass, collected a sample of an opah’s gill tissue.
Wegner noticed that the tissue had blood vessels to carry warm blood into the fish’s gills. The blood vessels then wound around those carrying cold blood back to the body core after absorbing oxygen from water. Engineers call this a “counter-current heat exchange.”
In this case, the car radiator-like system means that warm blood leaving the fish’s body core helps to heat up cold blood returning from the respiratory surface of the gills where it absorbs oxygen.
Opah live up to 1000 feet beneath the ocean’s surface in very cold, dimly lit waters, making this discovery all the more remarkable.
The researchers found that the industrious fish constantly flap its fins, which generate body heat. The flapping also speeds up the opah’s metabolism, movement and reaction times.
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