Learn more physics!
Q:
why all mammals have unnucleated RBCs except camel?what is the advantage of nucleated RBCs in camel?
- Manish (age 16)
kathmandu,nepal
A:
That was an intriguing question, about which I knew nothing. I found a few websites that said camel red blood cells had nuclei, but none of these sites looked like reliable sources. This
www.wseas.us/e-library/conferences/2007athensbio/papers/566-127.pdf seems to be a regular scientific paper by someone who knows the subject. Discussing the unusual form of camel RBCs, he writes
"The hypothesis that they throw back to the ancestral reptiles and other lower vertebrates seemed superficially obvious, and perhaps led to the error often published that camel erythrocytes are nucleated. In fact, they are anucleate, but are unusual and novel in vertebrates."
Mike W.
(published on 07/04/2011)
Follow-up on this answer.
