Osmoregulation is the process of maintaining salt and water balance across the body’s membranes. Any fish faces a challenge to maintain this balance. A freshwater fish struggles to retain salt and not take on too much water, while a saltwater fish tends to lose too much water to the environment and keeps a surplus of salt. Fish have developed behaviors and physiological adaptations to survive in their environments, whether fresh or marine water, but how do fish manage to thrive in both fresh and saltwater?
A catadromous fish spends most of its life in freshwater and then migrates to the ocean to breed. Eels of the genus Anguilla represent catadromous organisms. Anadromous fish begin life in freshwater, spend most of their lives in saltwater, and then return to freshwater to spawn. Pacific salmon and some species of sturgeon are anadromous fish.
How does a salmon maintain the composition of its body fluids within homeostatic limits? How does it reverse its osmoregulation physiology when it swims from a freshwater environment into the ocean or from the ocean to freshwater?
In the ocean, a salmon swims in a fluid nearly three times more concentrated than the composition inside its cells. In such an environment, the fish tends to take on salt from the water and lose water to the denser ocean. This exchange would result in severe dehydration and quickly kill the salmon if the fish did not adequately deal with the issue.
A Salmon faces the opposite problem in freshwater, where it lives in a solution nearly devoid of salts. In this case, the fish has more salt in its body than in its environment, presenting the problem of losing salt to the environment while flooding its body with water.
How does a salmon deal with these two warring issues of osmoregulation? The salmon has evolved behavioral and physiological adaptations to allow it to live in both fresh and saltwater habitats.
In the ocean, a salmon drinks several liters of water a day to maintain its water volume, but in freshwater, it does not drink at all, except for what it takes on during feeding. In freshwater, a salmon’s kidneys produce a large volume of very dilute urine to offset the excess water diffusing into its body fluids. In the ocean environment, though, a salmon’s urine is highly concentrated, consisting mostly of salt ions, and it excretes very little water.
A salmon also has a remarkable adaptation that allows osmoregulation by the fish in both marine and freshwater environments. A salmon uses energy to actively pump Na and Cl ions across the gill epithelial cells against their concentration gradients. In saltwater, the fish pumps NaCl out of its blood and into the surrounding ocean. In freshwater, the pump works in reverse, moving NaCl out of the water, over the gills, and into the blood.
These amazing behavioral and physiological adaptations allow a salmon to move from fresh to saltwater when the fish leaves its nursery area to travel to its ocean feeding grounds and then back from its marine habitat to freshwater when the salmon returns to spawn. The critical changes in osmoregulation are not immediate, though. When a salmon smolt first leaves its home stream, it must rest in brackish water for several days or weeks while it adjusts, and then it will slowly move into water with higher salt concentrations. As the smolt adjusts, its kidneys begin producing more-concentrated urine while the NaCl pumps in its gills reverse direction and start pumping NaCl out of the blood. When the salmon returns to its natal stream to spawn, it must again remain in brackish water for a period while its kidneys adjust, and the NaCl pump changes direction to pump NaCl out of the water and into the blood.
I am always amazed by how animals and plants adjust to the demands of their environment. Anadromous and catadromous fish, however, must adapt to two environments with opposite physiological requirements, and to do this, they flip the switch on osmoregulation from one extreme to the other.
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Robin Barefield is the author of four Alaska wilderness mystery novels, Big Game, Murder Over Kodiak, and The Fisherman’s Daughter, and Karluk Bones. Also, sign up below to subscribe to her free, monthly newsletter on true murder and mystery in Alaska, and listen to her podcast, Murder and Mystery in the Last Frontier.
