The influence of size and abiotic factors on cutaneous water loss

The greatest physiological threat to terrestrial life is dehydration; however, examining the factors that influence water balance in a teaching setting can be problematic. The proposed exercise examines cutaneous water loss using gelatin frogs. The use of models provides a unique approach to learning about water loss without the need of Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee approval or specialized equipment to measure dehydration from relatively small invertebrates. The first described hands-on experiment examines gelatin frogs of different sizes to understand how surface area-to-volume ratio impacts water loss. The second experiment exposes gelatin models to various conditions, such as convective air currents (wind) or extreme temperature, to understand how abiotic factors influence the vapor pressure deficit between the animal and environment and thus water loss. These easily adaptable activities use everyday household items and can be scaled accordingly to classes of different sizes and academic levels. Thus these flexible exercises can be approached through facilitated, guided, or open inquiry, as students formulate hypotheses, design the experiments, create graphs, and interpret the data through answering questions or a write up.