Air Breathing
Bichirs possess paired lungs which connect to the esophagus via a glottis. They are obligate air-breathers, requiring access to surface air to breathe in poorly oxygenated water. Their lungs are highly vascularized to facilitate gas exchange. Deoxygenated arterial blood is brought to the lungs by paired pulmonary arteries, which branch from the fourth efferent branchial arteries (artery from the fourth gill arch), and oxygenated blood leaves the lungs in pulmonary veins. Unlike most lungfish and tetrapods, their lungs are smooth sacs instead of alveoated tissue. Bichirs are unique in that they breath using a recoil aspiration.
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Famous quotes containing the words air and/or breathing:
“Easily, with a few convulsive quirks, they give up their watery ghosts, like a mortal translated before his time to the thin air of heaven.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“You have been here only a short time, Mr. Barnard. You cannot know what it is to live here month upon month, year after year, breathing this infernal air, absorbing the miasma of barbarity that permeates these walls, especially this chamber.”
—Richard Matheson (b. 1926)