My Pond-a place to relax and reflect.

My Pond-a place to relax and reflect.
Fall is here! Already......

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

What do you wonder about?


Do you ever wake up early and lie in bed thinking about really stupid things? Over the weekend I actually woke up thinking about something I recently read in one of my Koi Health books. I was reading the chapter on a Koi's air bladder and how they worked. To clarify, an air bladder is not used as a respiratory organ in fish, but rather a buoyancy organ. It allows the fish to move up in down in the water. And, most of us (me included) think a fish must inflate their air bladder in order to float or move up in the water. And, then deflate them in order to move down. When in fact it's the opposite. Air bladders are actually filled with gas that is pulled/reabsorbed from the blood. It does not change size either. It's not a balloon that gets bigger or smaller as it releases or takes on gas. It only changes pressure within. Water pressure is greatest as it deepens (deepens? is that a word?) Anyway, to maintain the size of an air bladder the fish must actually take on gas (or inflate) as it swims down in order to equalize the pressure of the water pushing in on the fish. The reverse would occur when the fish swims up. If it did not decrease the amount of gas in the bladder, the decreasing hydrostatic pressure would allow the elastic bladder to balloon, making the fish more buoyant, and it would pop up to the surface over-inflated and unable to swim down. So, fish inflate (put more gas into the bladder) as they swim down and deflate (reabsorb gas from the bladder) when they swim up. An example of this occurs in deep water fishing. A fish hooked and brought up rapidly is unable to deflate the gas bladder quickly enough and the fish is bloated with a greatly expanded bladder, sometimes protruding out of it's mouth. Now, since I fish, I have seen this phenomenon in hooked fish. But, what got me wondering is: if the air bladder is not connected to the mouth or esophagus in anyway, how can it come out of the mouth?? Does it rupture some organ to find it's way out? It would be like our heart expanding so much it comes out our mouth?? Now, does that make sense to you? So, that's what I laid awake ponding. Not how the air bladder works, but how the heck it could come out of the mouth??? Is that weird or what? I don't think I questioned it before cause for some weird reason I thought the air bladder was part of a respiratory system, so would have a connection to the mouth like our own lungs do. But it's not...So I'm going to email Richard Strange. The contributing author for this book. I actually took his Koi bacterial course, so ya, I have his email address. I got to get to the bottom of this.
And then, just this morning coming to work I heard this song that had the words "souped up" as in "they souped up their cars to see how fast they would go." "Souped up" wonder where that old saying came from? Anybody know? What do you wonder about? ???

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