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Human Circulatory System

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In large, complex, multicellular organisms, such as the human body, the circulatory system is essential to survival. Unlike single-celled organisms, such as bacteria and viruses, which are much smaller, the scale of the human body necessitates a large and complex transport system so as to ensure that substances can be transported around within it. Single-celled organisms, which are able to absorb oxygen and nutrients from the surrounding environment and excrete their waste products back out into the environment by means of diffusion (or osmosis, when water is involved), do not require a transport system, for this very reason. However, the sheer size of the human body and the distances that substances need to travel makes it impossible for …show more content…

The main organ of the circulatory system, and its ‘centre’, so to speak, is the heart, which is shown in the on the bottom right. Although the heart is not the largest of the body’s organs (the adult human heart is roughly the size of a clenched fist, and it only weighs about 310 grams), it is one of the strongest and, undeniably, the most important. The outer walls of the heart are made up of thick layers of muscle, which vary in thickness depending on where in the heart one looks - the muscle surrounding the left ventricle is much thicker than that surrounding the right ventricle, as the left ventricle has to pump blood further, and thus needs to be stronger. The inside of the heart is split vertically into two halves, separated by the septum, which each perform a distinct function: the right half receives the deoxygenated blood from the body and pumps it to the lungs, where it is reoxygenated, and the left half, which receives the freshly-oxygenated blood from the lungs, and pumps it to the rest of the body. These two halves are then ‘split’ horizontally into rough halves, leaving us with the atriums, which are the uppermost cavities, and the ventricles, which are the slightly larger of the two, located below the atriums. The atriums are not separated from the ventricles by walls of tissue, but instead by atrioventricular valves. On the right side, these valves are called the tricuspid valves, and on the left side, they are the mitral

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