Abstract
Neutral buoyancy is of great advantage to any object in water, a submarine like an animal, since it will help to save energy to avoid sinking or rising. Depending on their composition, fish are usually somewhat denser than the surrounding water, largely because of the skeletal and protein masses (densities around 2–3 and 1.3 g/cm3, respectively) which override the “floating” mass of fat (density 0.9). Thus their overall density is some 5% larger than that of water, and this results in a sinking force of about 5% of their weight, which to overcome in water can be shown to be a formidable energy expenditure (Denton, 1961). There are several ways in which animals have solved this problem to become neutrally buoyant (Denton, 1961), and the swimbladder is one such floating device.
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© 1990 Plenum Press, New York
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Scheid, P., Pelster, B., Kobayashi, H. (1990). Gas Exchange in the Fish Swimbladder. In: Piiper, J., Goldstick, T.K., Meyer, M. (eds) Oxygen Transport to Tissue XII. Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology, vol 277. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-8181-5_84
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-8181-5_84
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