How can whales drink salt water?

Question

Why can whales, dolphins and other sea mammals drink salt water with no ill effects and land mammals cannot?

Answer 1

All marine animals and birds ingest sea water with their food. Human kidneys can excrete surplus salt and we do so with small amounts of salt. Sea water contains a lot of salt and overwhelms our system. Marine animals have kidneys that can extract and excrete all the surplus salt so whales and seals can live happily in the ocean. Seabirds have a gland above the beak that does the same thing and penguins, shearwaters, petrels, albatrosses etc excrete the salt through their nasal tubes which are just above the beak.

I have seen penguins drinking fresh water when they return to land after an expedition to sea.

Answer 2

They dont drink it generally. But they do ingest it with their food. Their kidney is specially designed with a lot of lobe to excrete the excess so they dont dehydrate themselves. We get dehydrated by drinking salt water because we cant concentrate our urine (we loose a lot of water when we pee) marine mammals can concentrate the urine so it is mostly salt with little water loss.

Answer 3

because their system is made to filter out salt but our system digests everything including salt there are even many fish that cant be in salt water only fresh water
you can also think of it as gas and deisel

Answer 4

whales, like all other marine mammals do not drink water, they keep hydrated from there food

Answer 5

with a straw