We're going to start our tour of the organ systems by talking about systems that provide protection and support. First off, we have the integumentary system. The integumentary system is your skin, your hair, and your nails. Your skin, hair, and nails provide excellent protection. Your skin provides great protection against friction.
Right? We're always touching things, rubbing against things, our clothes are always rubbing on us. Skin is very tough, and you probably know if you ever have a place where skin is worn off, you really don't want to touch stuff because you don't have that protective barrier. Skin is also providing a waterproof barrier for your body, and it's keeping other random things from getting in. For example, you're covered in bacteria.
If you ever get a cut, you probably put some antibiotic ointment on it because that cut gives a way through your integumentary system for the bacteria to get inside your body. The integumentary system is also providing thermal regulation. In other words, it's regulating your body temperature. Now, most mammals, the integumentary system is doing this with body hair. We don't really use hair that way.
The way our integumentary system regulates temperature is through sweat glands and sweat. We cover our body with sweat, and then because we're largely hairless, it evaporates and cools the body. Now, interestingly, we're really the only animals that use sweat in exactly that way. So, next time you are covered and drenched in sweat and feeling disgusting, remember, it separates you from the animals. Alright.
Next up, we have the skeletal system. The skeletal system is your bones and your cartilage, and it is there largely to provide structure. The skeletal system is really the only hard stuff in your body. Without it, you'd be a lump of soft flesh, but your body has shape. It has structure because of the skeletal system.
It's also going to provide protection. Right? I can beat on my chest and I don't worry about it because I got a rib cage and a sternum that's protecting my internal organs. If I didn't have that rib cage, I would have just punched my heart repeatedly and that would have been a really poor choice. Next up, we have the muscular system, and the muscular system is going to provide movement.
Muscles are really the only thing in your body that can move on their own, at least on a tissue level. The way they move, well, they only move one way, they get shorter. And so when you flex a muscle, it gets shorter and pulls on things. For this reason, muscles and bones work really closely together. If you didn't have bones in your arm, if you flexed your bicep, your arm would just get shorter, but your bones can't get shorter.
So instead, they work like a lever and they bend. So muscles and bones work really closely together, so closely together, that sometimes they're taught as one system. Sometimes they're taught as the musculoskeletal system. That's going to be especially true if you're taking a physiology only class. Alright.
With that, we have 3 systems down, and I'll see you in the next video.