While diving, aquatic mammals must balance the oxygen conservation requirements of apnea with the oxygen utilization requirements of exercise. The resulting metabolic state depends on a complex range of behavioral, physiological, and metabolic conditions as required by the particular dive profile. Thus, at the one extreme of long duration diving, oxygen conservation requirements will outweigh those of exercise, while under conditions of rapid, short diving or propoising, exercise parameters will probably be of more importance than those of oxygen conservation. In the last several years, techniques for monitoring radioactively tagged plasma metabolites have allowed the visualization of metabolic variation throughout various diving and surface exercise regimes in aquatic mammals. By comparing such tracer turnover dilution curves under conditions of surface exercise, quiet forced diving, free diving, and sleep apnea, patterns emerge that demonstrate the extreme metabolic plasticity of the diving response. These comparisons have led to the conclusions that even short diving periods probably involve a marked change in metabolic steady state, and that aerobic diving is not simply analogous to aerobic exercise.
The human diving response, its function, and its control
