Air Breathing Aquatic Animals
In addition to water breathing animals, e.g., fishes, mollusks etc., the term "aquatic animal" can be applied to air-breathing aquatic or sea mammals such as those in the order Cetacea (whales), which cannot survive on land, as well as four-footed mammals like the river otter (Lontra canadensis) and beavers (family Castoridae).
Aquatic animals include for example the seabirds, such as gulls (family Laridae), pelicans (family Pelecanidae), and albatrosses (family Diomedeidae), and most of the Anseriformes (ducks, swans and geese).
Amphibious and amphibiotic animals, like frogs (the order Anura), while they do require water, are separated into their own environmental classification. The majority of amphibians (class Amphibia) have an aquatic larval stage, like a tadpole, but then live as terrestrial adults, and may return to the water to mate.
Certain fish also evolved to breathe air to survive oxygen-deprived water, such as arapaima (family Osteoglossidae) and walking catfish (Clariidae).
Read more about this topic: Aquatic Animal
Famous quotes containing the words air, breathing and/or animals:
“The air split into nine levels,
Some gift of tongues of the whistler”
—James Dickey (b. 1923)
“Ere I could
Give him that parting kiss which I had set
Betwixt two charming words, comes in my father,
And like the tyrannous breathing of the north
Shakes all our buds from growing.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion.... Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat’s meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)