Diving Of Humans And Animals
When a diver dives deep for a period of time, breathing regular
compressed air,
a certain amount on nitrogen will be dissolved in the blood.
If the diver comes
back up to the reduced pressure of the surface too
quickly, small bubbles of
nitrogen will form in the blood stream. This is
called "the bends" and
requires the person to spend some time in a
decompression chamber to gradually
reduce the pressure and allow the nitrogen
to escape the body. Some animals goes
down much deeper then we do, so how
come they don't get the bends are die from
the pressure? Like some seals and
whales that could go 10 times deeper then us
and comes back to the surface 10
times faster. How come they don't suffer from
this? Researchers had found
that deep diving animals rely far less on air stored
in their lungs and far
more on oxygen stored in their muscles. Their muscles
tend to hold unusually
high concentrations of myoglobin. A myoglobin is a
protein that picks up
life-giving oxygen from the blood and stores it for later
use in providing
usable energy for muscles by oxidizing sugars. Humans on the
other hand rely
on only their lungs and the compressed air in their tank for
diving. The
myoglobin in the humans carries much less oxygen. Matter of fact we
store
very few of our oxygen in the myoglobin, we store the oxygen in the lungs
and
use the oxygen for the myoglobin when we need to use it. When the seal
ascend
the lungs collapse rapidly, keeping large amounts of nitrogen from
entering
the blood. The collapse of the lungs halts the flow of all atmospheric
gases
form the lungs into the bloodstream. They also prevent the flow of
oxygen
into the blood. When this animal does deep dives, the muscles are
working much
harder than any other organ. It will carry their own supply of
oxygen in the
form of myoglobin. Deep diving animals' stores 47 percent of
its overall body
oxygen in its muscles, the rest is circulating through the
blood and lungs. Also
diving animals have a special way of controlling their
heartbeat. Not like us,
where we can't control our heartbeat. On land seals
has a heart beat of 107
beats per minute, but at sea, as it dives down to the
deep water, it slows to a
mean of 68 beats per minute. As the seal dives
further down the heart beat
gradually decreases. The rate of the heartbeat of
a seal can fall as low as
three beats per minute. A slow heart causes the
metabolic activities to slow
down. If the metabolic activity slows down, your
body will function slower; this
lets the seal dives deeper. In humans,
kidneys can be hurt quickly if blood flow
is reduced. But the diving animal
is unaffected by this. Their ability to slow
down the metabolic rate and
storing myoglobin in their muscles let these divers
dive deeper then us and
not suffer from the bend.