As mentioned, they breathe by water passing over their gills which has oxygen diffused in it. It is a similar process to breathing with lungs.<\/p>\n
Some fish<\/a> push water over their gills by gulping water in through the mouth and out through the gills. Other animals, such as sharks<\/a>, force water over their gills by continually swimming. If a shark stops swimming it will suffocate<\/a> because it has no other way of having water pass over its gills.<\/p>\n Mammals are warm-bodied, furred animals that are fed from their mother\u2019s mammary glands as young.<\/p>\n Contrary to what you might think, mammals can\u2019t breathe underwater. This is because mammals have lungs, which aren\u2019t capable of extracting oxygen from water in the way they would with air.<\/p>\n Typically, mammals cover almost every inch of land, such as humans and cows, but there are some mammals that have adapted to live primarily underwater such as whales. They don\u2019t actually breathe underwater, they simply take a big gulp of air at the surface and then hold their breath under they can resurface again.<\/p>\n Amphibians are truly unique creatures because they possess both lungs and gills, allowing them to breathe on land and underwater. Amphibians are covered in mucus that keeps their skin moist.<\/p>\n Amphibians like to live in muggy, damp environments to keep their skin moist. This is why you\u2019d typically see frogs<\/a> sat around small ponds and lakes.<\/p>\n While they are still young, they tend to live solely underwater, but as they develop into adulthood, their lungs develop allowing them to live on land to have better access to the animals that they feed on.<\/p>\n Reptiles are scaled animals that vary in shapes, sizes and colours. They are cold-blooded<\/a> and lay eggs rather than live young.<\/p>\n Environments differ for reptiles, but they thrive in warm environments because they are naturally cold-blooded, meaning that they rely on their external environment to heat their bodies.<\/p>\n While some of them spend significant amounts of time in water, such as crocodiles, they don\u2019t actually possess the ability to breathe underwater.<\/p>\n Similar to marine mammals, reptiles, such as snakes<\/a>, can hold their breath for significant periods of time, some as long as an hour, even though they don\u2019t possess gills to breathe underwater.<\/p>\n Incredibly, loggerhead turtles can survive on a single breath for up to 10 hours underwater!<\/p>\n Crustaceans are largely aquatic arthropods that have a hard exoskeleton to protect them from predators.<\/p>\n Examples of crustaceans include, crabs, lobster<\/a> and crustaceans.<\/p>\n They can be found all over the world in in freshwater and saltwater bodies scavenging for food such as fish, mussels and sea urchins.<\/p>\n Like their fish friends, they breathe underwater through gills drawing oxygen from the water that they inhabit.<\/p>\n Molluscs are soft-bodied invertebrates which are usually enclosed wholly or partly by a shell of calcium carbonate.<\/p>\n Molluscs are found in almost all freshwater and saltwater across the world, some are even found on land, such as the African Land Snail<\/a>.<\/p>\n Molluscs that are adapted to live underwater have evolved gills so that they can breathe underwater. This, however, wouldn\u2019t apply to the aforementioned African Land Snail because it doesn\u2019t venture into water.<\/p>\n Cnidarians are a varied group of animals that include coral, jellyfish and sea anemone<\/a>.<\/p>\n They are found all over the world, usually in shallow, coastal waters.<\/p>\n They breathe underwater via their skin, lacking any dedicated respiratory organs. Some of them, such as anemone, rely on algae on their surface to produce oxygen when they photosynthesise.<\/p>\n Echinoderms translates to \u201cspiny skin\u201d in Greek, which is an apt way to describe this class of animals that includes star fish and sea cucumbers.<\/p>\n They are found all over the world, in fresh and salt water and are an essential part of the ecosystems that they inhabit, feeding on algae and plankton.<\/p>\n Echinoderms breathe in a similar way to cnidarians, via their skin via things called skin gills.<\/p>\n They lack lungs or gills, and so must rely on water flowing over their skin to survive.<\/p>\n After finding out about the different ways that animals have adapted to sea life, we think you\u2019ll agree that this sheds an entirely different light on the ocean ecosystem and gives a new appreciation for something you may not have even considered.<\/strong><\/p>\n If you\u2019d like to take in the animals in person, <\/strong>book your tickets today for Deep Sea World<\/strong><\/a> so that you can test your knowledge of how each animal you see gets its oxygen.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When an animal lives on land, they\u2019re surrounded by air that they breathe in through their mouth or nose, into their lungs which then passes oxygen into the blood stream and around the body, but what do animals do when they\u2019re surrounded by water? In this blog, we\u2019re going to explore how these miraculous animals … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4272145169,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/neuronicdev.es\/deep-sea-world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/neuronicdev.es\/deep-sea-world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/neuronicdev.es\/deep-sea-world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neuronicdev.es\/deep-sea-world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neuronicdev.es\/deep-sea-world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9187"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/neuronicdev.es\/deep-sea-world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9187\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4272145800,"href":"https:\/\/neuronicdev.es\/deep-sea-world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9187\/revisions\/4272145800"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neuronicdev.es\/deep-sea-world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4272145169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/neuronicdev.es\/deep-sea-world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neuronicdev.es\/deep-sea-world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neuronicdev.es\/deep-sea-world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}How do mammals breathe underwater?<\/h2>\n
How do amphibians breathe underwater?<\/strong><\/h2>\n
How do reptiles breathe underwater?<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/neuronicdev.es\/deep-sea-world\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/iStock-1175177504-1024x683-1.jpg\")
<\/figure>\nHow do crustaceans breathe underwater?<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/neuronicdev.es\/deep-sea-world\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/iStock-1460078827-1024x683-1.jpg\")
<\/figure>\nHow do molluscs breathe underwater?<\/h2>\n
How do cnidarians breathe underwater?<\/h2>\n
How do echinoderms breathe underwater?<\/h2>\n