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Fish "breathe" the dissolved oxygen out of the water using their gills. It turns out that extracting the oxygen is not very easy -- air has something like 20 times more oxygen in it than the same volume of water. Plus water is a lot heavier and thicker than air, so it takes a lot more work to move it around. The main reason why gills work for fish is the fact that fish are cold-blooded, which reduces their oxygen demands. Warm-blooded animals like whales breath air like people do because it would be hard to extract enough oxygen using gills. Humans cannot breathe underwater because our lungs do not have enough surface area to absorb enough oxygen from water, and the lining in our lungs is adapted to handle air rather than water. However, there have been experiments with humans breathing other liquids, like fluorocarbons. Fluorocarbons can dissolve enough oxygen and our lungs can draw the oxygen out.

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16y ago

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