6 Animals with the Weirdest Heart

Jakarta, CNN Indonesia —

Heart is the main pumping engine in the animal body. When it comes to the weight of this organ, of course, every living thing has a different size. The human heart, for example, has a size of about 0.3 kilograms, while a giraffe’s 11 kilograms.

The size of a giraffe’s heart is large because it has to pump blood down its long neck to get to its head. But there are other animals whose heart shapes are unique and even seem strange.

Here are 6 of the strangest hearts found in animals, according to reports Live Science.

1. Frog

Daniel Mulcahy, a research fellow in amphibians and reptiles at the Smitsonian Institution, Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, says mammals and birds have a four-chambered heart, but frogs have only three, with two atria and one ventricle.

In humans, the four chambers of the heart store oxygenated blood in separate spaces. But in frogs, a groove called a trabecule holds oxygen -containing blood separated from oxygen -deficient blood in one of its ventricles.

In general, the heart takes deoxygenated blood from the body, sends it to the lungs, and pumps it throughout the body to oxidize the organs.

Meanwhile, frogs can get oxygen not only from their lungs, but also from their skin. The frog heart takes advantage of this evolutionary quirk. As deoxygenated blood enters the right atrium, it enters the ventricles and exits to the lungs and skin for oxygen.

Mulcahy says oxygenated blood returns to the heart through the left atrium, then to the ventricles and out to major organs.

He said frogs have a strange heart function because the hearts of frogs are frost-resistant, including the wood frog (Lithobates/Rana sylvaticus), whose heart actually stops when the frog freezes during winter hibernation.

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The blue whale’s heart is a fairly large organ, measuring 430 kilograms. Like other mammals, the whale’s heart has four chambers. This organ is responsible for supplying blood to an animal.

When blue whales dive deep into the ocean, their heart rate slows to four beats per minute, which helps them prolong their dive time and can even reduce decompression.

Thus, this slowed heart rate causes a decrease in blood flow to the lungs, according to a report in the journal Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology Part A: Molecular & Integrative Physiology.

3. Cephalopoda

These tentacular and armed sea creatures, including octopuses, squid and cuttlefish, each have three hearts.

The two brachial hearts on either side of the cephalopod’s body function to oxidize blood by pumping it through the gill blood vessels, and the systemic heart in the middle of the body and pumps oxygenated blood from the gills to the rest of the organism.

Cephalopods are also literally blue blooded because they have copper in their blood. Human blood is red because there is iron in hemoglobin.

Animals with the strangest hearts in the world read next page —>>>