Excretion

Excretion

Earliest animal life forms arose around 700 million years ago. They were marine organisms like the modern sponges. Each cell of a modern sponge is surrounded by sea water, but it maintains an intracellular ionic composition different from that of the sea water. Evolution led to changes in the organisation of the tissue layers followed by formation of specialized external tissue layers. This provided a barrier between the external environment and internal fluid resulting in the formation of extracellular fluid. Major changes in osmoregulation and ionic regulation occurred during the evolution of chordates. The ability to control extracellular fluid composition was essential for the diversification of animals to inhabit brackish water, fresh water and land. Animals that invaded land had the risk of desiccation and were unable to excrete metabolic waste directly into the water; hence there was a need for an alternate pathway to dispose the nitrogenous wastes.

Most animals rely on kidneys to control ionic and water balance. Some animals depend on external tissues such as the gills, skin and digestive mucosa to collectively regulate three homeostatic processes namely, osmotic regulation, ionic regulation and nitrogen excretion. Osmotic regulation is the control of tissue osmotic pressure which acts as a driving force for movement of water across biological membranes. Ionic regulation is the control of the ionic composition of body fluids. The process by which the body gets rid of the nitrogenous waste products of protein metabolism is called excretion. Nitrogen excretion is the pathway by which animals excrete ammonia, the toxic nitrogenous end product of protein catabolism. The removal of ammonia or other metabolic alternatives such as urea and uric acid is linked to ionic and osmotic homeostasis.

Fresh water vertebrates maintain higher salt concentrations in their body fluids; marine vertebrates maintain lower salt concentrations in their body fluids and terrestrial animals have more water in their body than the surrounding hence tend to lose water by evaporation. Osmoconformers are able to change their internal osmotic concentration with change in external environment as in marine molluscs and sharks. Osmoregulators maintain their internal osmotic concentration irrespective of their external osmotic environment (example: Otters). Depending on the ability to tolerate changes in the external environment, animals are classified as stenohaline and euryhaline. The stenohaline animals can tolerate only narrow fluctuations in the salt concentration (example: Gold fish), whereas the euryhaline animals are able to tolerate wide fluctuations in the salt concentrations eg., Artemia, Tilapia and salmons.

The major nitrogenous waste products are ammonia, urea and uric acid. Other waste products of protein metabolism are trimethyl amine oxide (TMO) in marine teleosts, guanine in spiders, hippuric acid, allantonin, allantoic acid, ornithuric acid, creatinine, creatine, purines, pyramidines and pterines.