The Extended Organism: The Physiology of Animal-Built by J. Scott Turner

By J. Scott Turner

Can the constructions that animals build--from the common-or-garden burrows of earthworms to towering termite mounds to the good Barrier Reef--be acknowledged to reside? even if counterintuitive the belief may possibly first look, physiological ecologist Scott Turner demonstrates during this e-book that many animals build and use constructions to harness and keep an eye on the movement of power from their surroundings to their very own virtue. development on Richard Dawkins's vintage, The prolonged Phenotype , Turner indicates why drawing the boundary of an organism's body structure on the pores and skin of the animal is unfair. because the buildings animals construct surely do physiological paintings, taking pictures and channeling chemical and actual power, Turner argues that such constructions are extra thoroughly appeared now not as frozen behaviors yet as exterior organs of body structure or even extensions of the animal's phenotype. via hard dearly held assumptions, a desirable new view of the dwelling global is opened to us, with implications for our knowing of body structure, the surroundings, and the awesome buildings animals construct.

(20001210)

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By J. Scott Turner

Can the constructions that animals build--from the common-or-garden burrows of earthworms to towering termite mounds to the good Barrier Reef--be acknowledged to reside? even if counterintuitive the belief may possibly first look, physiological ecologist Scott Turner demonstrates during this e-book that many animals build and use constructions to harness and keep an eye on the movement of power from their surroundings to their very own virtue. development on Richard Dawkins's vintage, The prolonged Phenotype , Turner indicates why drawing the boundary of an organism's body structure on the pores and skin of the animal is unfair. because the buildings animals construct surely do physiological paintings, taking pictures and channeling chemical and actual power, Turner argues that such constructions are extra thoroughly appeared now not as frozen behaviors yet as exterior organs of body structure or even extensions of the animal's phenotype. via hard dearly held assumptions, a desirable new view of the dwelling global is opened to us, with implications for our knowing of body structure, the surroundings, and the awesome buildings animals construct.

(20001210)

Show description

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The recovery of solutes from filtrate is only part of the fish’s process of maintaining high-solute concentrations in the blood. At the fish’s gills are specialized cells, known as chloride cells, that use ATP energy to transport chloride ions from the water into the blood; these ions then pull positively charged sodium ions along with them. Because salt is being transported from the dilute source of fresh water into the relatively salt-rich blood, energy is required to pump the chloride. The inflow of salts across the gills effectively offsets the diffusional loss of salts across the skin.

The supposed constraint is imposed by the Second Law, which states that any transformation of energy into useful work must be accompanied by the loss of a portion of that energy as heat: energy in → useful work + heat The problem is that physiological functions are powered only by energy being made to do useful work— with a few exceptions, heat is pretty much useless to an organism’s physiology. 1 Hypothetical efficiency of filtration work done by the fish kidney. Process CO2 + H2O → glucose glucose → ATP ATP → increase in blood pressure blood pressure → filtrate production we might call the inefficiency barrier.

20 t h e e x t e n d e d o r g a n i s m All corals are capable of producing calcite, whether or not they contain zooxanthellae. However, there is a strong correlation between the ability to build reefs— that is, to produce calcite in the enormous quantities necessary—and the presence of zooxanthellae. This implies that reef building is energetically demanding. The zooxanthellae are thought to be one explanation for why reef-building corals are common in the beautifully clear, but nutritionally impoverished, waters of the tropical oceans: they have a virtually unlimited source of energy (light captured as glucose) supplied to them by their protozoan house guests.

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