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?Contrary to what many people think, camels cannot store water in their humps. The humps are a dense fat reserve which serves as food. When the fat is used it does actually release water which makes the stories about camel’s humps holding water very near the truth.

The problem for the camel is that when it utilizes the fat deposits in its humps, oxygen is released and this oxygen sets off an additional loss of water via the lungs. So this gets rid of any extra water gained from the fat breakdown. The reason why a camel has a hump, or two, is that because storing all its body fat in one place allows it to lose excess heat more easily from the rest of its body.

The dromedary, or Arabian camel as it is also known, has only one hump, but the Bactrian has two.

Dromedaries do actually have one fully developed hump and one behind which is not developed. These camels grow to a height of about seven feet at the shoulder and have a body length of about ten feet.

The two-humped Bactrian is slightly taller and has a thicker and woollier coat.

Camels can also save water by retaining the urea that most other mammals excrete as part of their urine. In the camel, the urea is built into proteins in the stomach.

The other strange thing is that camels avoid sweating because their body temperature can vary over a much larger range of temperatures that any other mammal. They do not start to sweat until they reach a temperature of forty six degrees centigrade.

When a camel has had to go for a long period of time without drinking any water, it can drink as much as a hundred and eighty liters, or forty gallons of water at time. Apparently it is possible to watch them swell up as they drink this huge amount of water. All that water actually dilutes their blood and the fluids around their tissues in a way that would certainly kill other animals.

It is thought that this ability to drink such vast quantities of water has something to do with the strange shape of the camel’s blood cells. They tend to be slightly elliptical in shape, instead of the more normal round shape which is found in other mammals. What actually happens is that these oddly shaped corpuscles absorb so much water that they change shape and become small spheres full of water and diluted blood, and are elastic enough not to burst.