Hypoxia and Medicine

Why do mammals respire better at very high altitudes?

Describe several adaptations that might evolve to help members of a species of mammal respire better of the population began living continuously for many generations at very high altitudes.

Public Comments

1. Your question statement doesn't make much sense - mammals don't respire better at high altitude, but they can develop adaptations that will enable them to improve their gas exchange under those conditions. At high altitude the air gets very thin, so the actual amount of oxygen present gets much less and we have to ventilate more efficiently and extract the oxygen more efficiently from the lungs.For one thing, mammals living in those conditions will increase the amount of haemoglobin in their blood (a response to hypoxia, or low tissue oxygen, or hypoxaemia or low blood oxygen. The kidneys produce a hormone called Erythropoetin or EPO which stimulates bone marrow Red cell production. This is an adaptation seen in any mammal moving to altitude and takes about 10 days for the red cell increase to occur. As these mammals would also need to move more air in and out you would expect dilated airways and with time, more muscle development around the chest to create these greater ventilatory movements. This could occur over months to years. Eventually as the mammals were living in that environment over long periods of time (many generations) those with larger airways and better ventilatory musculature and barrell shaped chests would probably perform better and be more successful and the morphology (shape) of the animals would change.