Through diffusion, upwards of 70% of the oxygen in the water is transferred to the blood stream of the fish. The blood vessels carry deoxygenated blood directly from the heart of the fish and push it countercurrent to the water that runs up against the gills. The gills are covered with a flap that can be opened and closed at will, allowing the fish to essentially breathe in and out. They are basically a series of flaps of flesh with a tight lattice of blood vessels, arranged in a sheet to allow for maximum surface area.
While the idea is interesting, Costner would not be able to breathe comfortably in water unless he found a way to move water through his gills at 25,000 times the efficiency that fish have. Fish along with all gill equipped animals are cold blooded because it reduces the rate at which oxygen is burned within the body among other things.
What that means is his metabolism is at the level of a warm blooded creature: super high. Where Waterworld falls apart is that Kevin Costner is a human being, warm blooded and all that. Given that we mammals breathe air, roughly 200,000 parts oxygen per million our respiratory tracts are unable to deal with the 4-8 parts per million that water has. The gills themselves don’t actually allow the fish to breathe water, rather they allow the fish to pull oxygen out of the liquid. Gills are an organ that have specially evolved over the course of time to allow animals (fish, mollusks and such) to survive in water. Now, it seems like a pretty simple thing, but the science behind gills ruins the sci-fi flavor of the movie. Kevin Costner’s character in the film is able to breathe underwater because he has gills.
The movie follows a man named “The Mariner” as he wanders through a flooded post-apocalyptic end of days scenario, fighting bandits and criminals and being outcast because of a simple mutation. Barring other glaring scientific issues the film Waterworld has (like the total loss of all technology because of glacial melting) there is one that should be brought to light.
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