Apparently it can vary from little to a lot according to this: http://www.wh.whoi.edu/faq/fishfaq1c.html#q20
and http://octopus.gma.org/surfing/antarctica/salt.html says: Marine invertebrates in the Antarctic have the same concentration of salt in their bodies as the water. Antarctica has a surprising variety of invertebrates. Scientist David G. Campbell, reporting in the November, 1992 issue of Natural History Magazine ("The Bottom of the Bottom of the World") says that taxonomists have identified 875 species of mollusks, 650 polychaete worms, 299 isopods, 100 pycnogonids (sea spiders), 129 tunicates, and more than 300 different kinds of sponges. Many of these invertebrates grow to gigantic proportions. The giant Antarctic isopod Glyptonotus antarcticus is 4 inches long. A giant Antarctic sea spider is the size of a human's palm. Both the isopod and the sea spider in other seas are easily-overlooked specimens no bigger than a fingernail. In contrast, there are relatively few fishes. Only 120 species of fish out of 20,000 occur in Antarctic waters. Fishes' bodies have a lower concentration of salt than the ambient sea water, and their tissue freezes at about 31.7oF. If a fish just brushed against ice crystals in 28o sea water, the ice crystals would spread, and penetrate the fish's skin like a spear. Most invertebrates stay on the ocean floor, thus avoiding the floating ice, but a fish swims dangerously close to the pack ice. What's a fish to do to keep from freezing? One of the strangest-looking, but most successful fishes in Antarctica is the ghostly-looking ice fish. Antarctic whalers called it the white crocodile fish because of its large mouth with many long teeth. Ice fish have a natural antifreeze that keeps them from freezing in Antarctic seas. "The antifreeze consists of glycopeptides, molecules made of repeating units of sugar and amino acids, which depress the freezing point of water 200 to 300 times more than would be expected from the physical properties of the dissolved substances alone." (Natural History Museum, November 1992) The red blood cell-hemoglobin, doesn't carry oxygen well in low temperatures. Ice fishes don't have red blood cells. (This accounts for their deathly pallor.) Instead, ice fish have a large heart, wide blood vessels, and thin blood. These work well enough in cold water, but in temperate waters leave the fish sluggish and unable to compete with more energetic, red-blooded fishes. Therefore, the 16 species of ice fishes are confined to Antarctica. Marshall Ode Coyote wrote: > They probably do have salt in their blood just like we and do but the > level is not nearly the concentration of ocean water. It is low enough that > stranded sailors could safely drink the blood for survival. Turkey is not > salty either. Perhaps I shoud have put "salty" in quotation marks. > Ken > > At 10:26 AM 7/9/01 -0400, you wrote: > >Ode Coyote wrote: > > > >> Salt water fish are not salty. > > > >That is an interesting observation. Especially since in school they taught > >that all animals have salt in their blood because they evolved from ocean > fish > >at some point in time, and fish lived in salt water. If fish blood is not > >salty, that makes this conjecture pure hogwash. > > > >Do you have any references to support this? > > > >Marshall > > > > > >-- > >The silver-list is a moderated forum for discussion of colloidal silver. > > > >To join or quit silver-list or silver-digest send an e-mail message to: > >[email protected] -or- [email protected] > >with the word subscribe or unsubscribe in the SUBJECT line. > > > >To post, address your message to: [email protected] > >Silver-list archive: http://escribe.com/health/thesilverlist/index.html > >List maintainer: Mike Devour <[email protected]> > > > >
