Name : Lia Savitri Romdani Nim : E1A 011 031

Prody : Biologi Program

FISH OSMOREGULATION

Picture 1 Osmoregulation is how organisms balance the gain and loss of water, as well as regulate solute (for instance, salt) concentration. To understand osmoregulation, we need to understand semi-permeable membranes. A semi-permeable membrane is like a screen partition which lets some things through more easily than other things. When two solutions (for example, two bodies of water with different amounts of salt dissolved in each) are separated by a semi-permeable membrane the weaker solution (the one with less dissolved salts) will always dilute the stronger solution (the one with more dissolved salts).

Picture 2

The fish skin, intestin, and especially the gills are semi-permeable membranes. The fish body fluid is a stronger solution than the surrounding pond water. The water that fish live in, and even the water we drink is not pure H2O. It is the nature of water for mineral ions (Na+, K+, Mg2+, Cl- SO42- etc) to dissolve in it, in brief it is an excellent solvent. The ions that are dissolved in a body of water give it its ionic balance. Of course the same applies to the water that invests the cells of our, or a fish's body. We and the fish like to maintain the ionic concentrations, the ionic balance, of our personal waters at a level that is optimum for our biochemistry. For most species this internal balance is not in harmony with the balance of the environment. The mechanisms that fish use to maintain and internal ionic balance that is different to that of the water they are living in is called osmoregulation. The differencies of osmoregulation of freshwater teleost and marine teleost : The fresh and marine waters do not have the same ionic balance, although the balance that they do have is often fairly stable, but in places where they meet the ionic balance is often highly variable over time and place. All this makes problems for the fish, which over the millions of years of their evolution they have solved in a variety of ways. The ionic balance of sea water is about 1,000 milligrams of dissolved salts per litre, and that of freshwater normally around 8 to 10 milligrams of dissolved salts per litre or mgs/l. Freshwater teleosts obviously have a different problem, they are constantly absorbing water involuntarily and have to work to get rid of it again. They do this by producing copious quantities of dilute urine. A freshwater fish may produce the equivalent of 30% of its total body weight in urine every day. For example a 1 kg freshwater Pristis microdon, or Largetooth Sawfish produces about 250 millilitres of urine a day, in comparison a 1 kg marine Squalus acanthias or Piked Dogfish produces about 8 ml of urine a day and Scyliorhinus canicula or Small-spotted Catshark produces only 3 ml of urine a day. Freshwater fish pump water back out of their bodies by constantly excreting a weak urine. They may excrete up to 30% of their body volume each day. The pump is the kidney which takes up fluid from the body, removes the essential ingredients, and excretes the water. Most of the ammonia is excreted through the gills so the main function of the kidney is to remove water. Some medicines and other foreign chemicals may damage the kidney as it tries to reclaim the essential ingredients of the body fluid and, thereby, impair osmoregulation.

The marine teleosts however have not gone along this path, they evolved another way of dealing with the imbalance. Their preferred internal ionic balance is about 350 mgs/l or one third of that of the sea. Therefore they are always losing water, they compensate for this by drinking water, but because the water is salty they now have too high a concentration of salts in their internal environment. They solve this problem by actively excreting salts in concentrated form back into the sea. This is not easy, it is like pushing pebbles up a hill, as soon as you stop pushing they all fall back down the slope again. To achieve their goal fish have special cells in their gill filaments and the skin of their opercular that concentrate salt and then excrete it. Because they are pushing against the gradient, this process uses up energy and a percentage of a fish's daily intake of food, and thus its energy, is spent on the constant battle to keep the salt out.