The only possible exceptions I can think of are fish(I imagine gills and mouth are not connected but don’t really know). I am excluding bacteria and viruses and I believe they don’t really breath(correct me if I’m wrong).
The only possible exceptions I can think of are fish(I imagine gills and mouth are not connected but don’t really know). I am excluding bacteria and viruses and I believe they don’t really breath(correct me if I’m wrong).
Dolphins are the most classic example, having the blow hole.
Insects ‘breath’ through their ‘skin’
Dolphins can breathe thru their mouths tho.
There’s been some with damaged blowholes who have to resort to that.
What they do normally is like when you can “block” the connection of one or the other so air only goes thru one path. No idea how to describe that, or if other people can do it tho.
But if a dolphin needs to they can breathe thru their mouths just fine.
Do you have a link for that? Everything I’m finding says they can’t breathe through their mouth. There’s one scientific paper where they found a mouth breathing dolphin and said this has never been described in a scientific paper before. As far as I can tell there’s just this one dolphin who’s been seen doing it.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/mms.12349
Here’s a paper describing a dolphin that died due to blowhole obstruction:
https://meridian.allenpress.com/jwd/article/57/4/959/469580/Fatal-Blowhole-Obstruction-by-Eel-in-Common
To me it seems more like a one off case that a dolphin was able to mouth breathe, not that all of them can.
I mean, how many do you need?
It’s not exactly an ethical study to go around plugging blowholes and seeing how many live…
In the example of one who could, it appears the dolphin had a narrow blowhole (reminiscent of Hank Hill’s urethra).
But just like Hank could still pee, the dolphin could still breathe somewhat thru the narrow blowhole as evident by the barely noticable water spout.
That would have resulted in the dolphin surfaces more and for longer times, which probably gave him the opportunity to learn how to breathe thru its mouth.
Maybe not all can do it.
Not all humans can close off their nasal passage, that’s why some people have to wear nose plugs when swimming.
I have to pop my ears all the time, because of that I can close my nasal or throat passage on control, other people learn to do it for other activities…
But every single dolphin could be capable, just no reason to learn.
And in the (at most) 5 minutes it would take a dolphin to suffocate from a fucking eel clogging it’s blowhole just ain’t always enough time.
We have no idea how often it happens and the dolphin lives, or dies.
We do t have enough data to be making hard claims, and no one is torturing enough dolphins to find out.
Right, that’s what I’m saying. Not enough data to make hard claims, which is why I’m saying this statement is a bit of a stretch:
As far as I can tell this has happened once ever. I’m not sure that qualifies as “just fine” when there’s more evidence that plugging a blowhole is very bad for the dolphin.
I read about this after I had the showerthought that dolphins have their nose on the back of their head. Apparently they evolved a ‘plug’ to separate the nose-lungs and the mouth-stomach. It was thought they couldn’t control it, but they found an example of a dolphin who had a damaged blowhole and figured out how to breathe from the mouth. But it looked like it wasn’t easy, iirc the dolphin had to basically swim fast before surfacing to get the air to help force it open. The dolphin wasn’t expected to live long.