Humans are bipedal, terrestrial omnivores. As a species, we areadapted to quite a range of habitats, from deserts to mountains andfrom rain forests to tundra. Ultimately, however, we are descendedfrom early hominids who evolved in African plains, and our bodysystems tend to reflect this. Your job is to determine how humansmight be adapted if they had evolved in an aquatic environmentwhere they live entirely in the water and breathe throughgills.
Consider the following:
- What would be required to extract oxygen and exchangeCO2 and how the circulatory would have to change tocompensate? You are encouraged to look up other (non-human; can benon-mammalian) animals that share these habitats for ideas.
- What if humans had evolved and were adapted to live in veryspecific habitats? In other words, it would still look *basically*like a human but would have some important differences related toits circulatory and/or breathing systems.
- What would these systems of a human that adapted to a differentenvironment look like, and why would it look like this?
- You should consider the following parts of the breathing and/orcirculatory system in your answer: Heart – size, activity, Lungs -size, Breathing rate, Oxygen transport system, Blood - Red BloodCells (count), hemoglobin, and plasma levels, anything else youthink is important to the circulatory and breathing systems.
