[Sca-cooks] Camels

[Terry Decker]

Camels don't store water in their humps.  They apparently store it by adding 
up to 25 gallons to their bodily fluids.  Since a camel uses around 5 
gallons of water per day, this means between the hump and the stored water, 
the camel can survive about a week without food or drink.  I also don't have 
any information about how efficiently camels can extract water from plants 
or how concentrated their urine is, both survival traits in some desert 
animals, which might alter the survival period.

The stored water also seems to act as a temperature regulator, reducing the 
animal's need to sweat except in extremely high temperatures.

Technically, an animal can store water in fat, but the amount of oxygen 
required to metabolize the fat into water would probably extract more 
moisture from the lungs than was metabolized, causing a net water loss.

Bear

> Thought one or the other lind of camel stored water in the hump tissue.
> Sarah