And oxygen is INCREDIBLY DANGEROUS It fuels the fire that is all complex life but that fire must be carefully controlled Oxygen loose in the body (and the free radicals it forms) *corrodes and burns everything it touches*
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Hence the nutrients they tell you to eat that counteract this effect, "antioxidants", to slow the inevitable degeneration of aging
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Insects and worms and things have clear blood because they're small enough and use little enough oxygen they can survive having it dissolved directly in their blood Really big bugs, like crustaceans and tarantulas etc, use a chemical dissolved in the blood to bind O2, hemocyanin
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But vertebrates like us use so much of the stuff we need a purpose-built containment system, the red blood cell, to contain the protein, hemoglobin, that contains all the O2 we use
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The production of red blood cells in the marrow (as seen on the show) is an enormously expensive process but it's necessary We need that much O2 to burn through the energy we do (a dog or cat's muscles burn much hotter than a spider, which is why we don't have cat-size spiders)
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And if that O2 weren't kept carefully contained it would destroy us The Red Blood Cells in the show should be thought of as the equivalent of hazmat workers each transporting a cargo of deadly explosive Each erythrocyte is the equivalent of a ticking bomb
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Which would totally add to the stress the protagonist RBC experiences on the show And it means that they actually *aren't* "defenseless" against bacteria - a bacterium that tries to eat a RBC is in fact often horribly killed by the free radicals released by hemoglobin
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Having one of the germs try to eat Red Blood Cell only to accidentally puncture her container of O2 and have the germ go up in flames and horribly burn to death would be a pretty cool image for the show
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Replying to @arthur_affect
white blood cell just stares, she brushes it off with something like "there's a reason they don't let just anyone carry this stuff"
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Replying to @Random832 @arthur_affect
one interesting thing is that the loss of the nucleus is in the show just a cosmetic clothing change as graduation ceremony, when what it's showing is that RBCs are so heavily adapted (i.e. different from eukaryote ancestors) in order to carry O2 as efficiently as possible
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Yeah they're just big bags into which we've stuffed as much hemoglobin as possible because efficiency is so vital
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