Campbell Essential Biology, Seventh Edition,
Global Edition and Campbell Essential Biology
with Physiology, Sixth Edition, Global Edition
Chapter 21
Unifying Concepts of
Animal Structure
and Function
PowerPoint® Lectures created by Edward J. Zalisko, Eric J. Simon, Jean L. Dickey, and
Jane B. Reece
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It’s a Good Burn! A Moderate Fever is not
Always Your Body’s Enemy ; It can Help
Your Immune System During Battles
Against Infection
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Biology and Society: An Avoidable Tragedy
• The animal body self-regulates.
– When you play or work out hard, your muscles produce a lot of heat that in turn
increases your overall internal temperature.
– A control center in your brain initiates responses to keep your internal temperature
near normal 37°C.
– Under extreme heat exhaustion, body temperature rises to the point that it
disrupts the brain’s temperature control center and heat stroke occurs, causing
the body’s organs to begin to fail.
– Unless the body is cooled and hydrated, brain damage and then death can follow.
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The Structural Organization of Animals
• Life is characterized by a hierarchy of
organization.
• In animals,
– individual cells are grouped into tissues,
– tissues combine to form organs,
– organs are organized into organ systems,
and
– organ systems make up the entire
organism.
• As with all other areas of biology, a study of
animal bodies will highlight the interactions that
underlie life’s processes.
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Structural Hierarchy in a Human
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Anatomy and Physiology
• Biologists distinguish anatomy from physiology.
– Anatomy is the study of the structure of an organism’s parts.
– Physiology is the study of the function of those parts.
• The correlation of structure and function is a fundamental principle of biology that is
evident at all levels of life’s hierarchy.
• Thus, the structure-function principle is just another facet of one of biology’s major
themes: evolution.
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Structure Fits Function
• Checkpoint: Bird wings are hollow, which makes them lighter. Explain how this illustrates
the structure-function principle. The structure of the wing, with hollow bones, makes it
lightweight, which correlates with the function of flight.
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Tissues
• The cell is the basic unit of all living
organisms.
• In almost all animals, including humans,
cells are grouped into tissues.
– A tissue is an integrated group of
similar cells that performs a specific
function.
– Animals have four main categories
of tissue:
1. epithelial tissue,
2. connective tissue,
3. muscle tissue, and
4. nervous tissue.
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1. Epithelial Tissue
• Epithelial tissue, also known as epithelium, covers the surface of the body and lines
organs.
• The architecture of an epithelium illustrates how structure fits function at the tissue
level.
– Your skin contains many layers of tightly bound epithelial cells, forming a
protective, waterproof barrier that surrounds your body and keeps it safe from
external threats.
– In contrast, a single thin and leaky layer of epithelial tissue lines capillaries, where
it is well suited for the role it plays of exchanging substances with the circulatory
system.
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Epithelial Tissue
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2. Connective Tissue
• Two major functions of connective tissue are to support and join other tissues.
– In contrast to epithelium, with its sheets of cells, connective tissue contains cells
scattered throughout the extracellular matrix.
– The structure of the extracellular matrix varies, depending on the function of the
type of connective tissue to which it belongs.
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Types of Connective Tissue
Figure 21.4 illustrates six of the major types of connective tissue.
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3. Muscle Tissue
• Muscle tissue is a very abundant tissue in most vertebrates. Muscle tissue
– keeping the body upright, allowing it to move, and even pumping blood and
pushing food through the digestive tract
– consists of bundles of long, thin, cylindrical cells known as muscle fibers and
– has specialized proteins arranged into a structure that contracts when stimulated
by a nerve signal.
• Humans and other vertebrates have three types of muscle tissue, each with unique
contractile proteins: 1) skeletal muscle, 2) cardiac (heart) muscle, and 3) smooth
muscle.
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The Three Types of Muscle Tissue
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4. Nervous Tissue
• Nervous tissue
– makes communication of information possible,
– is found in your brain and spinal cord, and
– consists of a network of neurons.
• The basic unit of nervous tissue is the neuron, or nerve cell.
• The transmission of information allows neurons to coordinate functions within the body.
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Nervous Tissue
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Organs and Organ Systems
• The hierarchical organization of animals is an
example of one of the major themes in biology:
the importance of interactions among multiple
biological components.
• An organ consists of two or more tissues
packaged into one working unit that performs a
specific function.
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Organs and Organ Systems
• Organ systems are teams of organs that work together and perform vital body
functions.
• An organism depends on the interconnection of all its organ systems for survival.
• Your body is a whole, living unit that is greater than the sum of its parts.
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Human Organ Systems
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Exchanges with the External Environment
(1 of 3)
• Every organism is an open system that continuously exchanges chemicals and energy
with its surroundings. The ability to transform energy and matter is one of life’s unifying
themes.
– An animal’s size and shape affect its exchanges with its surrounding environment.
– Every living cell of an animal’s body must be bathed in a watery solution, partly
because substances must be dissolved in water to cross cell membranes.
– In a single-celled amoeba, every part of the cell’s membrane touches the watery
environment.
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Contact of Simple Organisms with the
Environment
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Exchanges with the External Environment
(2 of 3)
• Exchange with the environment is more complicated for complex, multilayered animals.
– Each cell in a multicellular organism has a plasma membrane where exchange can
occur.
– But this exchange only works if all the cells of the animal have access to a suitable
watery environment.
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Exchange Between the External
Environment and the Internal Environment
of Complex Animals
Figure 21.10 shows a
schematic model of an
animal body, highlighting
the three organ systems
(digestive, respiratory,
and urinary) that
exchange materials with
the external environment.
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Exchanges with the External Environment
(3 of 3)
• Complex animals have evolved extensively folded or branched internal surfaces that
maximize surface area for exchange with the immediate environment.
• For example, your lungs exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide with the air you breathe.
Lungs are not shaped like big balloons but are in fact millions of tiny hollow structures at
the tips of finely branched air tubes
Checkpoint: Is your body an open or
closed system? Why?
Your body is an open system because
the digestive, respiratory, and urinary
systems are in direct contact with the
external environment.
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Regulating the Internal Environment:
1. Homeostasis
• Animals adjust to a changing environment.
• The internal environment of vertebrates includes the interstitial fluid that fills the
spaces between cells and exchanges nutrients and wastes with microscopic blood
vessels.
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• Homeostasis, which literally means “steady state,” is the tendency to maintain
relatively constant conditions in the internal environment even when the external
environment changes.
• For instance, when you exercise, your muscles increase heat production, nudging
your body temperature upward. Similarly, when you drink a glass of fruit juice, your
blood glucose goes up. Homeostasis depends on the ability of your body to detect
and oppose these changes.
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An Example of Homeostasis
Despite large fluctuations in outside temperature, the cat’s internal temperature is tightly regulated
and only fluctuates slightly.
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2. Negative and Positive Feedback
• Most mechanisms of homeostasis depend on a principle called negative feedback, in
which the results of a process inhibit that same process, such as a thermostat that
monitors temperature and switches the heater on and off.
• If your body temperature is too high, a negative feedback loop will act to bring it back
down towards the set point, or target value, of 37.0 C.
• High temperature will be detected by sensors—in your skin—and relayed to a
temperature-regulatory control center in your brain. The control center will process the
information and activate effectors—such as the sweat glands—whose job is to oppose
the stimulus by bringing body temperature down.
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An Example of Negative Feedback: Control
of Room Temperature
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• Less commonly, organisms use positive feedback, in which the results of a process
intensify that same process.
• A positive feedback loop comes into play during childbirth. In childbirth, the baby's
head presses on the cervix and activates neurons to the brain. The neurons send a
signal that leads to release of the hormone oxytocin.
• Oxytocin increases uterine contractions, and thus pressure on the cervix. This causes
the release of even more oxytocin and produces even stronger contractions. This
positive feedback loop continues until the baby is born
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Checkpoint: When you flush a toilet, water begins to refill the tank. The rising water level
lifts a float. When the float reaches a certain height, it stops more water from entering the
tank. This is an example of what kind of homeostatic control? Why?
This is an example of negative feedback because the result of a
process (water filling the tank) inhibits that same process.
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3. Thermoregulation (1 of 3)
• The homeostatic mechanism that controls temperature is called thermoregulation.
– The ability to maintain a body temperature substantially warmer than the
surrounding environment is characteristic of endotherms, animals such as
mammals and birds that derive most of their body heat from their own metabolism.
– In contrast, ectotherms, which include most invertebrates, fishes, amphibians,
and nonbird reptiles, obtain their body heat primarily by absorbing it from their
surroundings.
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Thermoregulation (2 of 3)
• You have a number of structures and mechanisms that aid in thermoregulation.
1. Behavioral strategies
On a hot day, you might go for a swim,
drink some cold water, or sit in the
shade.
On a cold day, you might put on a coat,
or eat a bowl of hot soup.
Elephants spray themselves, and many
animals seek shade, lizards often bask
on a hot rock to warm up, and penguin
chicks huddle in a group to retain heat.
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2. Increasing heat production—thermogenesis
- One way to produce metabolic heat is through muscle contraction—for example, if you
shiver when you're very cold.
- This mechanism depends on specialized fat tissue known as brown fat, or brown adipose
tissue. Some mammals, especially hibernators and baby animals, have lots of brown fat.
Brown fat contains many mitochondria with special proteins that let them release energy.
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3. Controlling the loss and gain of heat
•Circulatory mechanisms, such as altering blood flow patterns
•Insulation, such as fur, fat, or feathers
•Evaporative mechanisms, such as sweating
3.1 Circulatory mechanisms
Shrinking the diameter of blood vessels that supply
the skin, a process known as vasoconstriction,
reduces blood flow and helps retain heat.
On the other hand, when an endotherm needs to get
rid of heat—these blood vessels get wider or dilate.
This process is called vasodilation. Vasodilation
increases blood flow to the skin and helps the animal
lose some of its extra heat to the environment.
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3.2 Insulation
Birds use feathers, and most
mammals use hair or fur. The same
response in people—
goosebumps—is not so effective
because of our limited body hair.
So, most of us wear a sweater!
3.3 Evaporative mechanisms
Evaporation removes heat and
can act as a cooling mechanism.
For instance, many mammals can
activate mechanisms like sweating
and panting to increase
evaporative cooling in response to
high body temperature.
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Thermoregulation in the Human Body
vasoconstriction
vasodilation.
• As shown in Figure 21.14, your brain has a control center that maintains your body temperature
near 37°C (98.6°F).
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Thermoregulation (3 of 3)
• Fever, an abnormally high internal temperature, is a body-wide response that usually
indicates an ongoing fight against infection.
– Many people mistakenly believe that the invading microbes themselves cause a
fever. In fact, the cause is usually the body’s fight against the microbes.
– A moderate fever of 38–39°C (100–102°F), however, discourages bacterial growth
and speeds the body’s internal defenses.
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4. Osmoregulation (1 of 2)
• Living cells depend on a precise balance of water and solutes.
• Osmoregulation is the control of the gain or loss of water and dissolved solutes.
– Osmoregulation is based largely on regulating solutes because water follows the
movement of solutes by osmosis.
– Osmosis occurs whenever two solutions separated by a cell’s permeable
membrane differ in their total solute concentrations. There is always a net
movement of water from the solution with lower solute concentration to the one
with higher solute concentration.
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Osmoregulation (2 of 2)
• Saltwater fish lose water by osmosis because there is less salt in their tissues than the
water in which they swim.
• Freshwater fish have the opposite problem: The external solute concentration is low, so
water enters the fish by osmosis.
• Most land animals lose water through urinating, breathing, and perspiring but can
counterbalance the loss by eating and drinking.
Checkpoint: A patient receives fluid through an intravenous (IV) line that causes his
interstitial fluid to have a very high solute concentration. What will happen to his cells?
They will shrink as water exits via osmosis.
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Counterbalancing water loss through
drinking.
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5. Homeostasis in the Urinary System (1 of 7)
• The urinary system plays a central role in osmoregulation, regulating the amount of
water and solutes in body fluids by retaining water when we are dehydrated and
expelling it when we are hydrated.
• Besides osmoregulation, the urinary system plays another important role—the excretion
of wastes.
– Chief among the waste products to be excreted in urine is urea, a nitrogen-
containing compound produced from the breakdown of proteins and nucleic acids.
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Homeostasis in the Urinary System (2 of 7)
• In humans, the two kidneys are the main processing centers with nearly 100 miles of
thin tubules and an intricate network of capillaries.
– As blood circulates through the kidneys, a fraction of it is filtered and plasma
enters the kidney tubules, forming filtrate.
– Filtrate contains valuable substances that need to be reclaimed (such as water
and glucose) and substances to be eliminated, such as urea.
– The anatomy of the human urinary system is shown in Figure 21.17.
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Homeostasis in the Urinary System (3 of 7)
• Nephrons
– The nephron is the minute or microscopic
structural and functional unit of the kidney
– carry out the functions of the urinary
system,
– consist of a tubule and its associated blood
vessels, and
– number more than a million in a kidney.
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Homeostasis in the Urinary System (4 of 7)
• Nephrons perform four key functions:
1. Filtration occurs as water and
other small molecules are forced
out of the blood when it passes
through capillary walls into the
kidney tubule, forming filtrate.
2. Reabsorption reclaims water
and valuable solutes from the
filtrate and returns them to the
blood.
3. Secretion of certain substances,
such as some ions and drugs, is
transported into the filtrate.
4. Excretion of urine from the
kidneys to the outside of the body
takes place.
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Homeostasis in the Urinary System (5 of 7)
• The vast majority of urine is water, with urea being the primary solute.
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Homeostasis in the Urinary System (6 of 7)
• Hormones regulate the kidney’s nephrons to maintain water balance and are central to
the interconnections of the nervous, endocrine, and urinary systems.
• Understanding filtration, reabsorption, and secretion will help you see why urine
samples are often used to assess health.
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Homeostasis in the Urinary System (7 of 7)
• Factors affecting urine composition include
– the environment,
– presence of disease,
– secretions from the various harmless microbes that can live in the lower part of
the urethra, and diet.
• Regulating the amount of water and solutes in body fluids is just one of many examples
of homeostasis.
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Evolution Connection: Adaptations for
Thermoregulation (1 of 3)
• Natural selection has promoted a wide variety of adaptations for thermoregulation,
including anatomical, physiological, and behavioral adaptations.
• A major anatomical adaptation in mammals and birds is insulation, consisting of hair
(fur), feathers, or fat layers.
• Some adaptations are physiological, such as
– land mammals and birds reacting to cold by raising their fur or feathers,
– hormonal changes tending to boost the metabolic rate of some birds and
mammals, increasing their heat production in cold weather,
– shivering to produce heat as a metabolic by-product of the contraction of skeletal
muscles, and
– panting and sweating to greatly increase cooling.
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Evolution Connection: Adaptations for
Thermoregulation (3 of 3)
• Behavioral responses regulate body temperature.
– Some birds and butterflies migrate seasonally to more suitable climates.
– Other animals, such as desert lizards, bask in the sun when it is cold and find
cool, damp areas or burrows when it is hot.
– Emperor penguins huddle together to stay warm.
– Many animals cool themselves by bathing.
• These mechanisms show how a single selection pressure can drive the evolution of a
multitude of adaptations in a wide variety of environments.
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Methods of Thermoregulation in Animals
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Copyright
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