Why is countercurrent exchange an advantage to animals

Oxygen would quickly pass from the water into the blood, until the oxygen levels of the blood and water rapidly became the same, and oxygen diffusion into the blood would stop. The maximum amount of oxygen that the blood could pick up would be only half of the total amount of oxygen in the water.

In contrast, countercurrent oxygen exchange allows the blood to pick up 90 percent of the oxygen in the water.

This impressive ability to acquire oxygen allows fish to thrive in water that has oxygen levels only a tenth of those at the top of Mount Everest, where most people cannot survive without supplemental oxygen. It just shows that fish are truly masters at breathing. The Fish Report. Water has a much lower oxygen content than air and as such fish need a much more efficient system that can extract a much higher proportion of oxygen from the surrounding water.

Oxygen would diffuse down it's concentration gradient from an area of higher concentration the water to an area of lower concentration the blood. However, as the water and blood continue to flow across the gas exchange surface an equilibrium would be reached with roughly equal concentrations of oxygen on either side of the gas exchange surface. At this point there would be no net movement of oxygen as there is no longer a concentration gradient.

Water flows over gills in one direction while blood flows in the opposite direction through gill capillaries. Whereas in a counter current flow, the mean temperature differences between the two streams are negligible in fluctuation and fairly consistent. When you take the LMTD logarithmic mean temperature difference in the 2 cases, the value is higher in a counter current flow than a co current flow. Do mammals use countercurrent exchange?

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Advantages and Limitations. What is cocurrent flow? Where does countercurrent exchange occur in the nephron?

Why does blood move in the opposite direction to water across the gills?