From the library

A fish that comes up for air: the betta's labyrinth organ and a bear that hunts underwater

A betta gulps air through a folded organ above its gills. A polar bear stayed under for 3 minutes 10 seconds. Neither is a target for you.

Breath Lab4 min read
Flooded rice paddies at sunrise, with young rice reflected in still water.
Flooded rice paddies at sunrise, with young rice reflected in still water.

A betta fish breathes air. A maze-shaped organ above its gills lets it gulp from the surface.

If you have ever watched one in a bowl, you have seen it happen without knowing what it was. The fish drifts up, touches the surface with its mouth, and sinks back down. It is not feeding. It is breathing.

A second way to breathe

Bettas, often sold as Siamese fighting fish, come from warm, shallow, slow water in Southeast Asia: rice paddies, swamps and sluggish streams in the Mekong and Chao Phraya basins. Water like that is often low in dissolved oxygen, especially in the heat of the day. Gills alone have a hard time there.

So bettas, like the other fish in their group (the gouramis and their relatives), carry a second breathing organ. It sits in a chamber above the gills and is called the labyrinth organ, because that is what it looks like: thin bony plates folded into a maze and covered in a membrane full of blood vessels. When the fish takes a gulp of air at the surface, oxygen passes from that air into the blood across those folds.

It is a fish solving a problem fish are not supposed to have. Its water does not hold enough air, so it goes and gets some.

A bear that hunts from below

The second animal this week goes the other way. A polar bear is a land animal that does much of its hunting at sea, and it sometimes does it underwater.

In 2015, Ian Stirling and Rinie van Meurs published a short paper in Polar Biology describing the longest polar bear dive on record. Off Svalbard, a bear stayed underwater for 3 minutes 10 seconds while it swam toward bearded seals resting on an ice floe. The point of staying under was not depth. It was to arrive without being seen.

Three minutes is nothing next to a whale. For a bear, it was long enough to be written up as a record. The copy we post about it stays with that one number and does not guess at how often bears do it or how their bodies manage it, because the paper does not say.

What neither of them is

It is tempting to turn animals like these into challenges. That is not what they are for, and it is not what this channel does.

A betta does not breathe air because it is trying harder. It breathes air because its body is built for the water it lives in. A polar bear does not hold its breath to prove anything. It holds it because seals look up.

Your own breath has its own design, and the useful question is how to work with it calmly, not how far you can push it. A useful caveat comes from a 2025 narrative review in Medical Sciences by Siebieszuk, Plonski and Baranowski, which looked across breathwork techniques used for chronic stress. Their reading is that most techniques share core physiological mechanisms, and that study quality across the field is uneven. It is a review, not a trial, and it does not single out alternate nostril breathing as special. What it suggests is practical: the technique you will actually keep doing matters more than the one with the most impressive name.

Two slow rounds, sitting down

That is why tonight’s video is short. Alternate nostril breathing, nadi shodhana, at an even count:

  1. Sit upright and let your shoulders drop.
  2. Breathe in through the left nostril for five.
  3. Breathe out through the right for five.
  4. Breathe in through the right for five.
  5. Breathe out through the left for five.
  6. Repeat once more. That is two rounds, about forty seconds.

There is no hold in it, nothing to beat and no target. If you feel lightheaded, stop and breathe normally. Never practise breath holds in or near water.

On Wednesday we add a calm seated hold, timed on screen, at a length most people can sit through comfortably. It is not a record attempt. The betta and the bear are interesting precisely because their bodies were built for what they do. Ours were built for something gentler, and a slow, counted breath is a good place to start.

Sources

  • Stirling, I. and van Meurs, R. (2015). Longest recorded underwater dive by a polar bear. Polar Biology.
  • Siebieszuk, A., Plonski, A. and Baranowski, M. (2025). Breathwork for Chronic Stress and Mental Health: Does Choosing a Specific Technique Matter? Medical Sciences 13(3):127. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40843749/
  • General descriptions of the anabantoid labyrinth organ from fish biology references.

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