Comments on: Aquaman #30: A Medical Review, part 2

By: Wanderer

Wanderer — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 02:39:32 +0000

Valid point on the goldfish, but the fish doesn’t technically “breathe”; the water is passed through the mouth, over the gills, and straight out of the body, so there is no “exhale” phase of the respiration. It’s why the term, “drinking like a fish” was coined.

By: Carl Fink

Carl Fink — Sun, 22 May 2005 03:07:11 +0000

Book “gills”, sorry.

By: Carl Fink

Carl Fink — Sun, 22 May 2005 03:06:52 +0000

Scott, you described filamentous gills in your article. Not all gills are like that — for instance, some arthropods have “book kills” that use flat membranes rather than filaments.

Also, fish do breathe. They pump water over their gills in pulses, not continuously. Haven’t you ever watched a goldfish, and seen it opening and closing its mouth?

By: M

Sat, 21 May 2005 20:25:09 +0000

Oooh! I was close on my exhaling nitrogen thing.

Uh, breath-in breath-out…? Lungs don’t work with water, it’s too dense and viscous. It’s not energy efficient to suck it in, stop it, and send it back the other way through all those, necessarily narrow, channels. That’s why gills use a continuous one-way flow. Of course, there’s probably not enough oxygen dissolved in seawater for reasonably sized gills or whatever to sustain a warm blooded creature anyway (and that’s before we get into the rate of heat loss for a human in cool water), but we have to ignore that to have the story at all.

Water in, oxygen out? Exo-thermic, not! Everybody now, post-elementary school fact callout; fish do need oxygen and they don’t breakdown water to get it, they use the small amount of O2 gas dissolved in the water.

By: Scott

Scott — Fri, 20 May 2005 14:36:12 +0000

1. Yes, there are some animals with both lungs and gills, but I don’t think it really applies here as it was shown early on that the Sub Diegoans cannot breath air, so their lungs pretty much just take up space.
2-4. Could certainly be all genetic changes, but where’s the fun in that?

By: Jim

Jim — Fri, 20 May 2005 06:32:09 +0000

1. Aren’t there some creatures which have both gills and lungs? (The lungfish, maybe? Tadpoles?)

2. They still started out as humans, so “breathing” is still a normal, autonomous activity. Further, as stated earlier, the humans’ gills seem to be small vs. body size, so perhaps “breathing” helps push water past the gills.

3. The humans presumably stay at the sea bottom the same way fishes do, or something similar. If they’ve grown gills, they’ve probably grown all sorts of other “fish glands”, too.

4. Pruney skin gets the same answer: the mutation.

5. I don’t read Aquaman, so what do I know?

By: Jim Kosmicki

Jim Kosmicki — Thu, 19 May 2005 03:37:26 +0000

Okay, I know that your new log is reminiscent of an old 80’s Comic Fanzine, but which one was it? I’m wracking my brain and can’t come up with it. It was one that the Thompsons were involved in, I think.