Isinglass place of Russian isinglass. The bladders, once removed from the fish, processed, and dried, are formed into various shapes for use. Before the inexpensive production of gelatin and other competing products, isinglass was used in confectionery and desserts such as fruit jelly and "blancmange". Isinglass finings are widely used as a processing aid in the British brewing industry to accelerate the fining, or clarification, of beer. It is used particularly in the production of cask-conditioned beers, although a few cask ales are available which are not fined using isinglass. The finings flocculate the live yeast in the beer into a
Swim bladder related (i.e., homologous) to lungs. Traditional wisdom has long held that the first lungs, simple sacs connected to the gut that allowed the organism to gulp air under oxygen-poor conditions, evolved into the lungs of today's terrestrial vertebrates and some fish (e.g., lungfish, gar, and bichir) and into the swim bladders of the ray-finned fish. In 1997, Farmer proposed that lungs evolved to supply the heart with oxygen. In fish, blood circulates from the gills to the skeletal muscle, and only then to the heart. During intense exercise, the oxygen in the blood gets used by the skeletal muscle before