Enteral respiration in the context of "Respiration (physiology)"

An aquatic animal is any animal, whether vertebrate or invertebrate, that lives in a body of water for all or most of its lifetime. Aquatic animals generally conduct aquatic respiration by extracting dissolved oxygen in water via specialised respiratory organs called gills, through the skin or across enteral mucosae, although some are secondarily aquatic animals (e.g. marine reptiles and marine mammals) evolved from terrestrial ancestors that re-adapted to aquatic environments, in which case they actually use lungs to breathe air and are essentially holding their breath when living in water. Some species of gastropod mollusc, such as the eastern emerald sea slug, are even capable of kleptoplastic photosynthesis via endosymbiosis with ingested yellow-green algae.

Almost all aquatic animals reproduce in water, either oviparously or viviparously, and many species routinely migrate between different water bodies during their life cycle. Some animals have fully aquatic life stages (typically as eggs and larvae), while as adults they become terrestrial or semi-aquatic after undergoing metamorphosis. Such examples include amphibians such as frogs, many flying insects such as mosquitoes, mayflies, dragonflies, damselflies and caddisflies, as well as some species of cephalopod molluscs such as the algae octopus (whose larvae are completely planktonic, but adults are highly terrestrial).

The swim bladder, gas bladder, fish maw, air bladder or sound is an internal gas-filled organ in bony fish that functions to modulate buoyancy, and thus allowing the fish to stay at desired water depth without having to maintain lift via swimming, which expends more energy. Also, the dorsal position of the swim bladder means that the expansion of the bladder moves the center of mass downwards, allowing it to act as a stabilizing apparatus. Additionally, the swim bladder functions as a resonating chamber to produce or receive sound.

The swim bladder is evolutionarily homologous to the lungs of tetrapods and lungfish, and some ray-finned fish such as bowfins have also evolved similar respiratory functions in their swim bladders. Charles Darwin remarked upon this in On the Origin of Species, and reasoned that the lung in air-breathing vertebrates had derived from a more primitive swim bladder as a specialized form of enteral respiration.