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Tracheal Tubes Of Mammals Comparison Essay

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The tracheal tubes of insects compared to that of the fish’s gills or the mammal’s lungs are structured in a way that makes the gaseous exchange function most efficiently. Each body cell in the insect is connected to a tracheole and the gases diffuse directly with the respiring cell, whereas in mammals and fish, the oxygen gas have to be diffused into the blood stream where it is then transported and diffused into the living cells (carbon dioxide is diffused out of the cell into the blood and then transported by the circulatory system back to the lungs to be diffused back out), which takes energy for the heart to pump the blood around the body to do this while the circulatory of insects have no role with gaseous exchange. However, the structure of the tubes limits the size of how big the insects can grow and so insect may have to adapt physically or behaviourally. If the insects exceed in size, the increased numbers of living body cells would mean an increase number of tracheal tubes are required, one for each cell. As well as increased cell numbers, the cells themselves will be larger and therefore require more oxygen for each. The problem here is that the increased volume decreases the surface area that the gases can be exchanged per unit time and would require great amounts of oxygen to diffuse …show more content…

In otherwords, the oxygen demand for the cell cannot be met, unless the insect was to evolve its’ shape to increase surface area by being flattened (like the waterbug example) or lower the demand by becoming slow moving (exercise/increased muscular movement increases the rate of gas exchange occurring as cells

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