Osmolarity In An Aquatic Environment

When an organism is in an aquatic environment, they are required to maintain their homeostasis from the difference in salt and other particles in solution and in their cell bodies. The salinity and osmolality in an environment triggers a series of regulatory responses in the organism to maintain equilibrium. The equilibrium is essential to its cell’s life and ultimately the life of the organism. The response to maintain such equilibrium is an osmotic regulation, the regulation of the solutes in solution and the cell bodies. When a cell is in an aquatic solution, water, ions, salts, and other permeable solutes are frequently exchanged between the environment and its cells to achieve equilibrium. When the cell movements of solutes are not equal …show more content…
When a net movement of particles between a cell and its environment is present, the shape a cell will change. However, when the osmolarity between the cell and its environment is the same, the shape will stay the same. The tonicity refers to whether the cell will shrink, expand, or keep a constant shape in solution due to the gain or loss of active osmotic solutes. However, the osmoticity refers to the solute concentration in the solution as compared to the cell body. Therefore, you would characters the cell by first looking at the osmolarities and then base its tonicity on that. An aqueous solution when compared to a cell could be described as hyperosmotic: where the solution has a greater concentration of solutes than the other solution; hypo-osmotic: where the solution has a lesser concentration of solutes than the other solution; and isosmotic: where the two solutions have the same concentration of solutes. For example, when the environment of a cell is a Salt marsh, depending on its location the salt concentrations will differ and the cell will go through an osmotic regulation. Therefore, animals in different environments would have to adapt its cells to its environment differently than others would in different environments. When refereeing to tonicity, if an animal cell is in a hyperosmotic solution, the environment is be referred to as hypertonic …show more content…
This experiment is preformed so that the diffusion processes of water through transport in a cell when its created environment is of different gradients and ultimately be able to determine the solution concentration in the cell will be understood better. By using conductivity sensors, the known salinities and osmolality’s in water solutions can be found. Likewise, creating and interpreting the conductivities of the known amounts of salinity on a calibration curve can be used to figure out the salinity of the unknown amounts given. The hypothesis for this experiment is that if a red blood cell is in a hyper-osmotic solution, or a solution with high salt concentrations, it will crenate. Likewise, if a red blood cell is in a solution with low salt and concentrations than the cells intra-cellular environment, the cell will undergo hemolysis. The dependent variable of the experiment is the cells volume and overall cell behavior. The independent variable is the created and known solution of different salt concentrations used to put the different red blood cells. The final cell behavior in solutions with different osmolarities is determining by how much light is transmitted using a colorimeter. It is important to understand the basics of this lab because doctors have to know someone’s blood/salt concentration to determine the treatment one needs