Zool 241

Lecture 2 - Water
“The animal and its environment are one”

Is this true? (Yes)

Could an animal survive if taken off earth?

Changing the environment must change its inhabitants

If we believe this, what happens when we change the environment?

What must organisms have the ability to do? Adapt or die

To regulate their internal conditions using…

Homeostasis (regulate internal to respond to external)
Homeostasis
Requires responding to environment

• Standing in one position…

• But implicit in this is that change happens.
• So, what must systems have?
Water
• Cornerstone of life on this planet
• Unique properties: SST - sea surface
temperature
• Unique structure and polarity
• Liquid, frozen structures and hydrogen bonds…
• Ties all things together
• Is a great heat sink
• Incompressible and thick
• Viscous thickness of fluid, rate of flow, resistance to motion

• Dissolves many things

• Ions “universal solvent”
• Gases
• Almost everything… at some concentration
 White colour of ice/snow - highly reflective, repels heat

Water - structure
If ice was not less dense than liquid water, ice would accumulate
on the bottom of oceans, they might freeze from the bottom up!

flotation
Water – a binding agent for life

groundwater pollution in bitumen

Water – phase transition and surface tension
• Removing heat may increase structural order, i.e. form ice
• What if this did not occur???
• Adding heat may enable the breaking of the hydrogen bonds and the
(energy)

formation of water vapor 0-100C

• At a large range of temperatures, water will have a surface tension

with respect to air above
• This tension is an invaluable interface for life to exist under and above
• Example animal, the mosquito
“planet’s largest murderer”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toWVK1LGNJQ
^ Mosquito breaks out of larva through surface tension of water, onto the surface

Surface tension exists due to Hydrogen Bonds (previous midterm Q)

 Water – surface tension
• A unique predator-prey interface
• The harder you push it, the harder it
pushes back
• Example: the Jesus Christ Lizard,
Basiliscus basiliscus
floating + surface tension (tension allows paddling)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45yabrnryXk Little guy “runs” on water

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Basiliscus_basiliscus_running_on_water_-_pone.0037300.s001.ogv
The feet actually paddle below the surface (act of paddling with feet or flippers is possible due to surface tension)
 Water and heat
• Water and all of its bonds can absorb a great deal of heat
• There is a high ‘latent heat of vaporization’ (energy or ‘enthalpy’ to turn a
liquid to a gas)
• One of the reasons we sweat Energy goes INto formation of vapour, and OUT of you (cooling effect)
• Conversely, water can be used to store heat
• Life takes advantage of the water-heat relationship

Most life

Large size = lots of water = lots of heat

Humps of fat store heat rather than give it up to
environment (i.e. sweating)
 Water – incompressible and thick
• There are no free ‘spaces’ in water… consequently, you can’t make
room in it, you can only push it out of the way
• (Exception… gases and ions)

• What happens when you put water in a bottle and squeeze it then? Volume
must change, right? Gas can go into solution

• What happens to animals that live under huge volumes of water?

• Huge pressures mean major adaptations, such as to gases
• Gas in water is under pressure
• The more pressure, the more gas in solution.
• Example, diving and ‘the bends’, i.e. decompression sickness (DCS)
Gas in solution within body comes out of solution - gas bubbles in the joints
Scuba Diving
Bubbles in your head, brain scarring
Regulator allows breathing pressurized air
Water - viscosity
• What happens if an animal needs to move water?
• It will take energy
• Moving water or fluids from one place to another is called ‘bulk flow’
• Example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_MRI
 Water - Ions Putting stuff in water without changing volume

• Water is typically full of ‘stuff’, even freshwater

• Some of the most important solutes are ions:
• Anion – charge unbalanced to the negative, i.e. more electrons than protons
• Cation – charge unbalanced to the positive, i.e. more protons than electrons

• Why do ions readily dissolve into water?

• Polarity Waste product in fish, gets rid of nitrogen
Humans use urea to get rid of nitrogen
Dipole also polar - dissolves in water, can be
excreted

Water Ammonia (NH3) Carbon dioxide (CO2)

smells bad - brain saying “this is bad for you”
Water - ions
• Adding salt to water will increase fluid mass but strangely, not water
volume… ? This is possible because…
• Believed to be due to the ordering of water around ions… ions are not sitting
randomly in water.
• Example, the hydration shell of sodium:
Dipole-ion interaction
2 possibilities for ion channels:
-Sodium + hydration shell
Consider, if a cell needs to move -Just sodium
sodium, is it just moving sodium?
Moving just sodium is more expensive - requires energy input to remove hydration shell

What kind of bonds must be broken if

just sodium were to be moved?
Lewis acid (sodium ion) — lewis base (water)

Hydration shell of sodium: 6 water molecules::1 sodium atom

A mimic of Na+ and hydration shell: Tetrodotoxin (TTX)

• Found in pufferfish (Tetraodontiformes), toads,

flatworms
• Derived from bacteria (Pseudomonas and Vibrio)
• Numbness of lips and tongue  paresthesia of
extremities muscle fatigue bradycardia, hypotonic
blood pressure respiratory failure and muscle
paralysis
TTX
• Blocks voltage-gated Na+ channels
• Guanidinium moiety (blue) of TTX mimics the
hydrated Na+, enters the Na+ channel, covalently
binds to a glutamate side group inside channel
Result: channel blocked, no nervous transmission = “wiring shutdown”
Water - hydrophobicity
• Some compounds hate water, i.e. are not readily miscible
• Consider oil and water… what is behind this?
• Lack of polarity
eg. Phospholipid tail

This saturated chain, i.e. no C=C only C-C with H, is not polar.

Non-polar compounds may have hydrophobic interactions

… without this, no cellular membranes…
Water – the ‘gas’ CO2
• Gases exist as gases in solution… but also many dissolve into solution
• Water hydrolyzes with CO2 to form a very valuable ion: bicarbonate

CO2 + H2O H2CO3 HCO3− + H+

 Roughly, what is
the difference in
[ions]?

Major vs minor
ions?
Major: 10^3 (thousandfold), 3x as strong as in
freshwater!

Minor: 10^2, hundredfold as strong as in freshwater!

What about [CO2]?

Bicarbonate (taken to 1 sig dig) does not change

 We evolved in saltwater - used to handling ions

Body of water fed from both

fresh and salt water

Figure 27.4 Salinity

trends in an estuary
 Water – ionic gradients in estuaries
• The ‘salt wedge’ or halocline
• Life moves and has moved across this gradient eg. this fish —>

• The challenge of estuaries: too much salt and too little salt

Why move into salt water? —> more food

Incurs cost of dealing with salt water to grow faster

Freshwater (FW)

Life

Seawater (SW)

By C.Bergereau - Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London (vol. 1868, plate XXI), Public Domain,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15408287
Water – measuring ‘stuff’ in it
• Aside from measuring gas pressures, there really are just two ways to
go to examine things in water:
• By their individual amounts, i.e. molarity (M) Concentration of one substance in solution
• Or by the aggregate amount, i.e. osmolarity (Osm) Effect of solutes in general in solution

• Examples:
• 2 moles of urea are added to 1L of pure water
• What is the molarity? 2M
• What is the osmolarity? 2Osm
• 1 mole of NaCl is added to 1L of pure water
• What is the osmolarity? 2Osm —> Salt dissolves into 2 ions
Water – movement across a barrier
• Guiding principle of everything: Water moves with respect to how much stuff is in it

• Things want to move down their gradient; everything wants to even itself out
• Nothing can move up a concentration gradient

• What does this mean for water movement with respect to ions?
• Osmolarity of a solution dictates where water will move
• In the below, where does water want to move?

Water (lower conc. below) Freshwater (FW)

Ions (lower conc. up)

Seawater (SW)
Water – ion movement across a barrier
• Guiding principle of everything:
• Things want to move down their gradient; everything wants to even itself out
• Nothing can move up a concentration gradient

• What does this mean for ion movement with respect to water?
• Diffusion of ions dictates where they will move
• In the below, where do ions want to move?

Freshwater (FW)

Seawater (SW)
Experiment:
Water – ions and cells
Change osmolarity
Ions now at a higher concentration inside the cell, so water… (1)
around a cell
Cell volume therefore… (2)

Over time, the cell returns to normal volume by: (3)

Ions now at a higher concentration outside the cell, so water… (4)

Cell volume therefore… (5)

Over time, the cell returns to normal volume by: (6)

In these examples, cell volume was held constant by the process of

homeostasis. Implicit is that the cell is regulating internal ions.
Water – cell osmolarity
Water – an estuary and a resident
Questions:
Where is homeostasis occurring?
Where is homeostasis not occurring?