Did you know that fish can also feel thirsty?

Do fish drink water? Yes, marine fish can feel thirsty and drink water too. If they don’t, they could die of dehydration. Here the simple explanation.

Why do marine fish drink water?

The fish drink enough water and constantly. Sea water is very salty (as you already know), for every liter there are about 35 grams of salt.

The body of the fish is made up mostly of water, the rest are organic substances and few salts.

Sea fish are facing a serious problem: the  osmotic process . Osmosis is a phenomenon that consists of the flow of water to maintain balance .

If two volumes of water with different salt concentrations are placed in contact, only separated by a permeable membrane, the water from the area with less salt begins to flow towards where the water of higher density (with more salt) is found.

In this way, as the sea water is considerably saltier than the liquids inside the marine fish, they constantly lose water, suffering from terrible dehydration.

To avoid dying of dehydration,  the fish needs to drink water . In this way it obtains a high concentration of salt and maintains the balance.

But he encounters another drawback: the large amount of salt. Fortunately, your body gives you two ways to get rid of excess salt: through the gills and urine.

Isn’t it amazing what fish do to survive?

As a curious fact, if the environment in which marine fish are used to living radically changes its salinity, they probably will not survive for long.

For example, if you take a marine fish and put it in a freshwater tank, the fish will swell with water. This is because the inside of the fish is now saltier. The fresh water from the fish tank will flow towards the marine fish until there is a balance, unfortunately that will be fatal for the poor fish.

Do river fish drink water?

In the case of river or freshwater fish, the opposite happens to marine fish. While marine fish become dehydrated, river fish are at risk of swelling or dying from excess fluids. How do they solve this inconvenience?

River fish do not drink fresh water. They do not need water, because they do not dehydrate. When they open their gills, they are not drinking water, but breathing.

Inevitably, however, the process of osmosis will do its thing and water will flow into your body through your skin and gills. To maintain balance, they will eliminate water through urine.

And did you already know that marine fish drink water so as not to die of thirst? And did you know that river or freshwater fish do not drink water, because if they do they could die from excess fluids?

They are curious facts about marine animals , very interesting, don’t you think?

Something else on our curious planet

In the marine world there are more curious facts about fish, for example, did you know that there is a parasite that eats the fish’s tongue and becomes the fish’s tongue? Although it seems terrifying, the fish lives on.

There is a very curious red-lipped fish, you can read the article on the batfish: Did you know that the enigmatic red-lipped batfish uses its fins as ‘legs’ to walk?

There is a work of symbiosis in the marine world. The fish have a little friend that helps them clean: Did you know that the cleaner shrimp feeds on the bacteria that it cleans from the fish?

And finally my recommendation. Is it true that there are fish that cannot swim? How do these animals live if they don’t know how to swim.