How Do Arabian Camels Travel 100 Miles of Desert and Endure Weeks Without Water?

Out of all the animals in the world, camels have an incredible ability to survive for weeks of traveling long distances in the desert even without drinking water. It is amazing to know how their bodies cope up with this kind of stress.

For instance, one-humped Arabian camels (Camelus dromedarius) have the legendary ability to travel up to 100 desert miles for weeks without access to water. An analysis of their well-developed kidneys has proven its significant role in helping them cope with the dehydration and rehydration process in their bodies.

Dehydrated Camels Use their Kidneys to Prevent Water Loss

In humans, their kidneys shift gears to preserve as much moisture as they can when the body runs low on water. The liquid is filtered in the cortex, an area of the kidneys where water flows into another part called the medulla. Then, ions from dissolved salt are pumped across the membranes to cause an imbalance that forces some water to return to the blood, while the other parts of water are excreted as urine.

Likewise, camels have similar mechanisms in their body but researchers recently found that Arabian camels take it to the extreme. According to Science Daily, they are incredibly well-adapted to the desert environment to endure weeks of no access to water. Researchers believe that the kidney plays a significant role in avoiding water loss and reabsorption of water.

The study, "Multiomic analysis of the Arabian camel (Camelus dromedarius) kidney reveals a role for cholesterol in water conservation" published in Communications Biology, was born in 2015 with the onset of collaboration between researchers from the University of Bristol and the United Arab Emirates University.

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Cholesterol in Kidneys of Camels Plays A Role in Water Conservation

The team was studying the genes in the kidneys of the Arabian camels and compared them to dehydrated and hydrated camels.

"We identified hundreds of genes and proteins that are significantly changed in both kidney cortex and medulla in dehydrated and rehydrated animals compared to controls," said University of Bristol animal physiologist Fernando Alvira Iraizoz in a news release published in Nature Economy & Evolution.

They found that many of the changed expressions in dehydrated camels are involved in suppressing the cholesterol in their kidney, ScienceAlert reported. When they measured the amount of cholesterol in kidney plasma membranes, they found that dehydrated camels have less cholesterol than hydrated camels.

Moreover, they also discovered that the coding for transporting ions and water across cell membranes is also being expressed more in dehydrated camels, which supports the team's hunch that cholesterol suppression brought by dehydration allows camels to cling onto more water in their kidneys.

Researchers explained that the decreased amount of cholesterol in the membrane of kidney cells helps facilitate the movement of solutes and water across different sections of the kidney that helps it efficiently reabsorb water and produced highly concentrated urine to avoid water loss.