Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by caymanjim 2501 days ago
Sea mammals manage just fine.
1 comments

Yeah, because they live underwater and can use said water to flush the waste salt. My question is how a non-water mammal gets rid of the waste salt...
A 1 minute web search shows this to be incorrect.

Sea mammals get most of their water from the food they eat (fish, etc.), and don’t drink seawater.

That’s not quite correct, “some marine mammals are known to drink seawater at least on occasion” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-can-sea-mamma...

They do supplement that with water extracted from their food. But unlike humans they are better at expelling salt. “In the seal and sea lion species, for which measurements exist, the animals' urine contains up to two and a half times more salt than seawater does and seven or eight times more salt than their blood.” Human urine on the other hand contains less salt than sea water resulting in dehydration when drinking sea water.

Well then you should be criticizing the person I responded to for suggesting sea mammals have a "gland" that filters salt from water.
> ...for suggesting sea mammals have a "gland" that filters salt from water.

No-one made any such suggestion. One person lamented that such a gland didn't exist; they did not assert its existence. The other person didn't mention glands at all.

The other person responded "sea mammals manage just fine" after I questioned how a salt gland would work in humans.

That infers sea mammals have working salt glands.

Not mammals, but some reptiles and birds do.

https://seaturtleexploration.com/turtle-tears/

You are mixing up the words “infer” and “imply”. But anyhow, no the other commenter did not imply that sea mammals have extra salt glands that humans do not.
This begs the question how do fish get water in seawater environments.
By inference something along those lines had to exist somewhere along the ocean food chain...