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Osmoregulation
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Osmoregulation means the physiological processes that an organism uses to maintain water balance;
that is, to compensate for water loss, avoid excess water gain, and maintain the proper osmotic
concentration (osmolarity (/knowledge/Osmolarity.html)) of the body fluids. Most humans are about 55
to 60 percent water by weight (45 percent in elderly and obese people and up to 75 percent in newborn
infants). Many jellyfish (/knowledge/Jellyfish.html) are 95 percent or more water.
 Osmoconformers and Osmoregulators
Not all organisms osmoregulate. Some marine animals such as the sea stars are osmoconformers; their
body fluids are similar to seawater in osmolarity, so they gain and lose water at equal rates and have no
need to expend energy expelling water or salt from the body. However, if they are placed in water more or
less concentrated than seawater, their tissues shrink or swell, their organelles and cell membranes are
damaged, and they die. This is why echinoderms are not found in estuaries, or river mouths where fresh
and salt water meet and the salinity fluctuates greatly. Osmoconformers are stenohaline ( steno means
"narrow range," and hal means "salt"), unable to tolerate much variation in environmental salinity.

Osmoregulators, on the other hand, maintain a more or less stable internal osmolarity by physiological
means. Terrestrial animals must osmoregulate because they unavoidably lose water by evaporation
(/knowledge/Evaporation.html) and excretion, and replacement water is not always immediately
available. Marine osmoregulators maintain an internal salinity lower than that of seawater, and
freshwater osmoregulators maintain an internal salinity higher than that of fresh water. Euryhaline ( eury
means "broad") animals, those able to tolerate a broad range of environmental salinity, must be good
osmoregulators. The blue crab, Callinectes sapidus, for example, thrives in estuaries and requires
efficient osmoregulation to survive there.

Osmoregulatory Mechanisms
Water cannot be actively transported across cell membranes because there are no carrier proteins
capable of binding and transporting it. Water can, however, pass directly through membranes in response
to changes in ion concentration. Water movement is therefore controlled indirectly, by pumping ions
such as sodium and potassium (/knowledge/Potassium.html) across cell membranes, creating a
concentration gradient that causes water to follow by osmosis . If sodium is excreted from the body, for
example, water tends to follow it. The rate of water loss can thus be regulated by hormones (../Ho-
La/Hormones.html) that control the rate of sodium excretion or the water permeability of the excretory
ducts.
Osmoregulation is usually achieved by excretory organs that serve also for the disposal of metabolic
wastes. Thus, urination is a mechanism of both waste excretion and osmoregulation. Organelles and
organs that carry out osmoregulation include contractile vacuoles, nephridia, antennal glands, and
malpighian tubules (/knowledge/Malpighian_tubule_system.html) of invertebrates, and salt glands and
kidneys of vertebrates.
Contractile vacuoles are organelles in the cells of sponges and freshwater protozoans. In the freshwater
Amoeba proteus, for example, the bubble-like contractile vacuole (/knowledge/Contractile_vacuole.html)
swells with excess fluid from the cytoplasm . Its membrane then pumps valuable ions back into the
cytoplasm, leaving mainly water in the vacuole. Contractile proteins surrounding the vacuole then
abruptly compress it, squirting the water out of the cell through a pore in the cell membrane. The vacuole
then slowly begins to refill, repeating the process with a rhythm superficially resembling a heartbeat.
Nephridia are tubular structures that filter body fluids other than blood, found in flatworms, annelids, and
many other invertebrates. Beating cilia or flagella draw fluid into the tubular system, leaving cells and
proteins behind in the tissues. The tubules then reabsorb useful substances such as glucose and amino
acids from the fluid and return them to the tissues, while secreting excess ions into the fluid. Finally, the
excess water, ions, and metabolic wastes are expelled from the body by way of nephridiopores in the
body wall. Nephridia are called protonephridia if the inner end of the tubule is closed, like a porous bulb,
and extracts liquid from the tissue fluid. These occur in flatworms such as planarians and tapeworms.
Metanephridia have a funnellike opening at the internal end, through which they draw in fluid from the
body cavity. Earthworms have metanephridia.
Antennal glands occur in crustaceans (/knowledge/Crustaceans.html) such as crayfish. They receive a
blood filtrate , modify it by the reabsorption of some substances and secretion of others into the fluid,
and then expel the modified fluid (urine) from a pore at the base of the antenna.
Malpighian tubules are found in spiders and insects. Numbering from two to several hundred, they are
attached in clusters to the digestive tract between the midgut and hindgut and hang freely in the
abdominal cavity. They absorb water and ions from the coelomic fluid and pass the fluid to the gut. The
hindgut reabsorbs most of the water, leaving excess ions and metabolic wastes to be excreted with the
feces, which are often dry.
Salt glands are associated with the eyes, nostrils, or tongue of marine reptiles (sea snakes, sea turtles,
marine iguanas, saltwater crocodiles) and birds (gulls, albatrosses). These animals ingest excess salt
with their food and water and excrete it by way of these glands.
Kidneys are vertebrate (/knowledge/Vertebrate.html) osmoregulatory organs in which blood pressure
forces fluid to filter through the walls of blood capillaries into tubules that process the filtrate into urine.
Each human kidney has about 1.2 million tiny balls of capillaries called glomeruli, where the blood
pressure is very high. A filtrate of the blood plasma, free of cells and protein, seeps from these capillaries
into a hollow ball called a glomerular (Bowman) capsule. From there, it flows into a series of tubules that
remove most of the salt and water along with useful material such as glucose and vitamins, while
secreting hydrogen and potassium ions, urea, and drugs (for example, penicillin and aspirin) into the
tubular fluid. A final tube in the pathway, called the collecting duct, adjusts the salinity of the urine by
reabsorbing variable amounts of water, before the urine leaves the kidney for storage in the urinary
bladder and eventual elimination from the body.
Two hormones, aldosterone (/knowledge/Aldosterone.html) and antidiuretic hormone, regulate the
amounts of salt and water reabsorbed, enabling the human kidney to adjust water loss or retention to the
body's state of hydration. Human blood plasma and tissue fluid normally has an osmolarity of 300
milliosmoles per liter (mOsm/L); that is, 0.3 mole of dissolved particles per liter of solution. Human urine
can be as dilute (hypoosmotic) as 50 mOsm/L when the body is voiding excess water, or as
concentrated (hyperosmotic) as 1,200 mOsm/L when conserving water.
Freshwater fish, by contrast, cannot produce hyperosmotic urine, but they have no need to. Surrounded
by water, they can afford to produce abundant, dilute urine to flush away their metabolic wastes. Among
mammals, the ability to concentrate the urine is also little developed in aquatic forms such as beavers
and muskrats. Kangaroo (/knowledge/Kangaroo.html) rats, by contrast, are desert rodents that need
never drink water (they obtain it from food), and can concentrate their urine to as much as fourteen
times the osmolarity of their blood plasma (compared to four times for humans).
SEE ALSO Arachnid (../A-Ar/Arachnid.html) ; Blood (../Bl-Ce/Blood.html) ; Crustacean (../Co-
Dn/Crustacean.html) ; Echinoderm (../Dn-Ep/Echinoderm.html) ; Estuaries (../Ep-Fl/Estuaries.html) ;
Excretory Systems (../Ep-Fl/Excretory-Systems.html) ; Homeostasis (../Ho-La/Homeostasis.html) ; Insect
(../Ho-La/Insect.html) ; Kidney (../Ho-La/Kidney.html) ; Physiological Ecology (../Ph-Po/Physiological-
Ecology.html) ; Pasteur, Louis (../Oc-Ph/Pasteur-Louis.html) ; Protista (../Po-Re/Protista.html)
Kenneth S. Saladin

Bibliography
Harris, C. L. Concepts in Zoology, 2nd ed. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.
Willmer, P., G. Stone, and I. Johnson. Environmental Physiology of Animals. Oxford: Blackwell Science,
2000.

Human kidneys are about the size of a fist. They are located in the back, just below the rib cage. Every
day, the kidneys filter about 200 quarts of fluid. Approximately 2 quarts leave the body in the form of
urine, while the rest is retained in the body.

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User Contributions:

1
jotivini Sep 10, 2006 @ 11:23 pm
(/Oc-

I JUST WANNA THANK YOU PEOPLE FOR PUTTING OUT THIS USEFUL INFORMATION OUT IN THE
WEB. IT REALLY HELPS UNFORTUANTE KIDS LIKE US TO HELP US IN OUR RESEARCH. A BIG
VINAKA VAKA LEVU. THANK YOU VERY MUCH.FROM FIJI.....

2
bob Aug 12, 2008 @ 6:18 pm
(/Oc-

how dare you use such terrible gramma "iotivini", "wanna" is not a word.
 3
yt Jul 15, 2014 @ 3:03 am
(/Oc-

Very usefull and easy to understand. Included lots of info but should also go further into detail
about the functions of the organs.

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