Importance Of Water For All Living Creatures

Water is important for all living creatures such as humans, plants and animals. Without water not even a small cell could survive. At heart, organisms on earth consist of cells as their building blocks with membranes that separate the organism from its environment. In this regard, water is essential simply because it’s a liquid at room and body temperature, and therefore water provides an efficient way to transfer substances from a cell to the cell’s environment and vice versa.

While water helps us transporting many important substances into and within our body it also has another important function which is flushing out the waste from the human body to keep our system clean. This is happening via our kidneys and water is then leaving the body as urine. Water is also important in all steps of our digestion. It starts with the saliva in out mouth, followed by the acids in our stomach and the liquids moving through our bowel.

Also, to maintain our body temperature we need water. When it is hot or we are very active like during sport or hard work our body generates sweat which helps maintain our body temperature. It must not increase too much otherwise we dehydrate and we get fever.

Most importantly, water is also necessary to keep your brain functioning well, which is important for school, work and many different things and without water our brain couldn’t function at all.

Water is also present in most of our food such as meat for example. Meat can come from cows, chicken, pigs, rabbits and other animals. If those creatures wouldn’t get water, they would die and then humans or predators in the wild couldn’t get food either. Generally, without water not much would work, since it is used for so many different things.

The human body needs one to seven litres of water a day and if it doesn’t get a fair amount of it you will get dehydrated which can cause a lack of concentration and consciousness and can lead to death. An average adult is contained of around 60% of water. Some plants and animals don’t take up that much water such as cactuses living in dry areas, for example in the dessert. These, as I said, don’t need much but contain of a lot of water. Cactuses consist of 90% water. People question how do cactuses get water in the wild if it barely rains there? Well, the most used water source by cactuses is actually groundwater which is stored underneath the earth’s surface hidden from the above. Cactuses are generally easy to keep because they don’t need much care and are fun to watch growing.

All types of aquatic animals need water as their environment such as fish. Some need saltwater some need freshwater. To survive, fish, crabs, oysters and others must also have sufficient levels of dissolved oxygen in the water too. The amount of dissolved oxygen in an estuary’s water is the major factor that determines the type and abundance of organisms that can live there. And if there is not enough oxygene and water then there will not be aquatic life.

Below zero-degree Centigrade water freezes into ice. Ice and snow are present in the colder regions of our planet – the poles and high mountain ranges. Many animals that live in these regions depend not only on water like mentioned above but they also need the ice as their environment. Polar bears are one example. Without ice they lose their natural habitat.

Also, when astronomers search for life outside of our solar system, they look very very far into space and even beyond our galaxy, the milky way. They stop their search when they find an exoplanet like Gliese 581d for example. Gliese 581d is around 1.5 times the size of our planet Earth, and like Earth, it orbits in what’s known as a star’s habitable zone. This describes the range where a planet can have water in its liquid form. And where there’s liquid water, there might, just possibly, be life…