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| assium stress manipulationexcept there was no Mother Ocean surrounding them. Plants and animals further elaborated the concept of a closed circulatory system to the point that, by closing off their surfaces to the air and pumping a recreation of sea water through their bodies, they could convince their cells that they still lived in the ocean. Plants and animals on the land had to, in effect, start carrying bags of synthetic sea water inside them . . . a salty water bringing food to cells and taking waste products from them, a functional substitute for the washing waters of the sea. |
| This brought up a problem, particularly as plants and animals moved further away from coastal regions: how to get enough sodium to maintain the internal ''sea water'' that must, by necessity, be rich in sodium and poor in potassium. |
| In the ocean, larger animals had to gather sodium from their cells and excrete it out into the water. On the land, plants and especially animals had to gather sodium from their surroundings and hoard it internally. This, in order to keep that well-oiled sodium-potassium imbalance, an imbalance easy to maintain in the ocean, far more complex on dry land. Land animals evolved mechanisms that had to become increasingly efficient at keeping that circulating "ocean" within a very narrow range of salinity, diffusing free gases through it by way of lungs and gathering the dissolved waste products drawn off from the cells into concentrated fluids held in an organ that could then excrete them from the whole colony of cells. |
| How does this relate to urinary tract problems? |
| We carry our ocean within us as lymph and blood. |
| We diffuse gases through lymph and blood by respiring with our lungs. |
| We maintain the salinity and volume of our internal "ocean" with our kidneys. |
| We concentrate a small amount of the processed |
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