Understand The Difference Between Freshwater And Saltwater

Everyday people drown in bathtubs and oceans. The main difference between your average bathtub water and ocean water is that bathtubs are filled with freshwater and the ocean is filled with salt water. Many people question the difference between saltwater and freshwater concerning drowning. To understand the difference between drowning in freshwater versus drowning in salt water it is important to understand how red blood cells react with both hypertonic and hypotonic solution concerning the cell transport process, osmosis. When people go swimming, they will sometimes question the likelihood of surviving if they drowned in either freshwater or saltwater. To understand how the body reacts to both saltwater and freshwater, it is important to …show more content…
When red blood cells are submerged in saltwater, the saltwater solution is referred to a hypertonic solution. Opposed to a red blood cell being submerged into a freshwater solution that is defined as a hypotonic solution. When a human begins to drown in a hypertonic solution, the red blood cells begin to lose water, hence causing it to shrink as an effect of the solution having a greater concentration of solute than inside of the red blood cell. When the human is submerged into a hypotonic solution, the red blood cells begin to swell with water, hence causing it to expand because the solution has a lower concentration of solute. In lecture, we observed videos of red blood cells bursting in freshwater and red blood cells shrinking in saltwater. The way red blood cells react to both hypertonic and hypotonic solutions relates to the osmosis lab experiment I performed on potato strips. When I placed a potato strip in distilled water, it became rigid, opposed to the potato strip that was placed in saltwater that became bendable. Like potato strips, red blood cells will become more rigid in freshwater and they will become more bendable in