High altitude is a great subject to study.
Higher altitude environments have much less availability of oxygen due to the lowered atmospheric pressure, which makes it slightly tougher for human's to get the required oxygen into their bloodstreams. This obviously disturbs our homeostasis because our body isn't entirely used to trying to survive on less oxygen, so our body will work harder to get the oxygen it needs.
A short term adaptation to this lowered oxygen level is that our bodies increase our breathing and heart rate by as much as double, and our pulse rates and blood pressure increase due to the heart trying to pump more blood to get oxygen to cells. A facultative adaptation is rather hard to pinpoint here... The decrease in air pressure causes many changes in the body, but i guess the best example I can think of is how our ears adapt to the change in pressure. As our bodies move up and down through altitudes, our ears tend to 'pop' which isn't really a necessary feature of our bodies adapting to a change of external pressure. A developmental adaptation that our bodies do in order to adapt to a decrease of air pressure is that our bodies increase our red blood cell and capillary counts through a process known as acclimatization. Our lung size increases to contain the osmosis of oxygen and carbon dioxide. A cultural adaptation to higher altitudes could be how people have changed their own breathing styles. Some people have more hemoglobin, which allows them to expand their lungs much better than others. Some people have increased their rate of breathing to also adapt to the lowered oxygen levels.
High altitude training is a very common form of training for professional athletes. The benefits of higher altitude training is the fact that it increases your lungs ability to process oxygen and increases red blood cell counts. The study of how humans adapt to lowered oxygen environments has helped the world of professional athletes because it is a natural, and legal, way to train your body to be better than it was before.
Well, sickle cell anemia is a disease that is very problematic when it comes to higher altitudes. Sickle cell anemia is a disease that is predominant in people from tropical and sub-tropical regions where malaria is common, so it is a rather racial disease that could cause some very serious complications when introduced into an environment with lowered oxygen levels. Even still, the study of the environmental influences on high altitude adaptation is better than to just use race because it is a selective disease. The disease is basically reacting to the environmental changes that occurs around the body, so that is why it is better to study the environmental changes.
High altitude is an interesting one. It's true that as we get into a higher altitude, we have a harder time breathing, and our ears do pop! I did not know that professional athletes use the higher altitudes for training. That was an interesting paragraph. You have great information. I learned something new! Good job.
ReplyDeleteGood opening discussion on high altitude stress.
ReplyDeleteYour short term description is very good.
Another word for "facultative adaptation" is "acclimatization". So your description of the increase in blood cells and capillaries in your developmental section should actually be in the facultative section.
Keep in mind that facultative adaptations involve the turning on and/or off of genes to produce a change in the body. This isn't the case with our ears popping. Our ears pop as a minimal mechanical reaction to differential air pressure in our ears to the point where the difference in pressure is released by the opening of the eustachian tube, either by choice (we "yawn") or the pressure itself opens the tube.
You mention the increase in lung capacity, which is indeed a developmental trait.
Increase breathing rates in not a cultural trait but a biological one. Cultural traits may include changes in work practices to account for reduced oxygenation or the use of oxygen tanks to provide more oxygen. There has also been suggestions that the chewing of coca leaves by Andean populations could help with hypoxia. You mention high altitude training in the next section... this is a cultural adaptation to encourage the body to adapt biologically.
Good third section.
If sickle cell/malaria forms an environmental cline by which you can study their occurence, I'm confused as to why you consider this a 'racial' disease. It may be dominant in African populations, but that is a geographical, not racial, designation. I do see you come around to this conclusion later in the paragraph, but it doesn't address the question of why race isn't useful in explaining human variation?
Also... Images?
ReplyDeleteHigher altitude was a good topic that you chose and the post was very informative. I didn't know that oxygen and altitude level affected each other so much. You had good examples and I understood your post very well. You did a good job on describing the affect of high altitude and the four stress adaptions.
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