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| Re: Alligator and Elite lungs (for Jilly) | |
| Posted By: scarab | Date: 1/17/10 5:07 a.m. |
In Response To: Re: Alligator and Elite lungs (for Jilly) (SPARTAN-034) : Now I'm not entirely clear on this, but they way I'm interpreting what you : said is that the muscles in the fish's tail are used to pump blood through : their bodies, and that the Elites may operate in the same way using their : leg muscles. If that were true, wouldn't they go into cardiac arrest from : just standing still? According to the books, Elites are supposed to have multiple hearts and are good in high-gee situations. I was just saying that if you want extra hearts to pump blood or lymph back from the legs against gravity then the best place to put the pump would be as low as possible. So that was just a bit of fun. The main heart does most of the work, the hypothetical feet pump would just return fluid that would pool in the lower limbs over time. It would also make sense of their rather weird foot anatomy. We have one way valves in our veins that divide long veins into a series of gated chambers that takes advantage of muscles squeezing the veins as you move to pump blood back to the heart. Fish don't have those but they do have (ostial) valves between tributaries and the major vessels and these do force one way flow. I suspect that Elites would get away with really tight skin on their legs, its what Giraffes do. There is a Giraffe dissection in 'Inside Nature's Giants' from Channel 4; the skin on their legs looked about 5mm thick. And I was thinking that the main Elite heart would be so cool that it wouldn't need help :-) But if Elites had those two major vessels then they could come together to make hearts anywhere along their length. It would work as long as the orientations of major vessel valves lined up. In the diagram below the Elite's head is on the left, his feet to the right, there are 2 hearts: a cranial (towards the head) heart and a caudal (towards the tail) heart (perhaps where the major vessels of the legs join) ----<===>------->====>-----
So they could have cool hearts and more than one of them.
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