And the answer is B. A is an illustration of skin.

C is an illustration of the respiratory system.

D is an illustration of the digestive system,
and E is an illustration of the nervous system.
Above a certain level of organization, all multicellular organisms
require a circulatory system for transporting and distributing
gases, nutrients, and the waste products of metabolism.
The mammalian circulatory system consists of the blood vascular
system and the lymph vascular system.
The lymph vascular system is the one you may not know very much about.
And that's actually a detour for tissue fluid returning to the blood vascular
system, and most of the channels have lymph
node groups staged along the pathway.
The lymph travels through the lymph nodes for immune filtration
and also for immune surveillance.
The blood vascular system and the lymph vascular system
have features in common.
So both have fluids in the case of circulating fluids.
In the case of the blood vascular system, the fluid is blood.
And blood will transport gases-- primarily, oxygen and carbon dioxide,
nutrients, waste products, hormones, heat, and so on.
Heat is not something that you ordinarily think of the blood vascular
system as transporting, but the blood vessels
do play an important role in carrying heat away from one region into another
and also in cooling regions through mechanisms
like countercurrent circulation.
In addition to the fluid, the blood vascular system has a muscular pump--
and the muscular pump is the heart-- and finally, a network of blood vessels--
arteries, veins, and capillaries-- for distributing and delivering
blood from the heart to the tissues and then returning it to the heart again.
The lymph vascular system consists of lymph.
"Lymph" is a clear fluid which begins as tissue fluid in the extracellular
spaces.
It's similar in composition to blood plasma.
And instead of transporting nutrients and oxygen,
lymph in the lymphatic vessels transports cell debris,
fats absorbed by the intestines, bacteria, and unfortunately,
cells from many cancers.
So cancer cells, once they leave the primary site,
can travel either in lymphatic vessels and metastasize to lymph nodes
or enter the venous circulation and travel directly to the lungs usually.
In addition to lymph fluid, the lymphatic system
consists of lymphatic capillaries and vessels, which carry lymph back
until it enters the blood vascular system.
In its passage from tissues to the blood vascular system,
lymph usually passes through at least one or more lymph node groups.
What happens in the lymph node groups is that small particles are
filtered out and engulfed by cells in the lymph node and foreign antigens,
foreign proteins are recognized by other immune cells
so that the general immune system becomes aware of them.
Blood consists of two parts.
The liquid part is plasma, and blood cells and platelets are the solid part.
If you take a tube of blood and spin it down in a centrifuge,
you can separate the blood cells and the plasma.
After this is done, the "hematocrit" is the percentage of whole blood
volume made up of the blood cells and "plasmacrit"
is the percentage of plasma represented in the sample.
So once you centrifuge it, the cells settle out to the lower layers
and the plasma rises to the top.
In the centrifuge sample, the hematocrit will consist primarily
of erythrocytes-- or red blood cells-- whose function is to transport gases.
The red blood cells-- the erythrocytes-- comprise about 45%
of the whole blood sample.
The "buffy coat" is a term that's used for the very thin central band
in the centrifuge tissue which consists of white blood cells and platelets.
"Platelets" are fragments of larger cells found
in bone marrow, megakaryocytes, and platelets function in clotting.
"Plasma" is a fluid consisting of water, plasma proteins, and solutes.
Here's a look at some of the cells that you would find in the buffy coat,
and those are white cells using hematoxylin and eosin stain
that you learned about in an earlier module.
They don't look like white cells.
They actually look like pink and purple cells,
but these are what are called the "white blood cells."
The term "leukocyte" is actually Greek, and what it means is "white cells."
First, we have a neutrophil.
Then, we have an eosinophil, which responds
to infections, parasitic infections, and also to allergic reactions.
We have a basophil, which are very uncommon cells,
a small lymphocyte, a larger monocyte, and finally,
a platelet which, again, is a fragment of a megakaryocyte.
So those are the cells that inhabit the buffy coat.
And the erythrocyte is the cell that's visible down at the bottom.
Notice that-- in contrast to everything else, except the platelet--
the erythrocyte has no nucleus.
So birds have nucleated red cells.
Reptiles, fish have nucleated red cells.
But in mammals, the nucleus has been sacrificed
to provide a larger apparatus for carrying iron pigment-- hemoglobin.
So at this point, two quiz questions.
And your first question is, which of these blood cells
is most numerous by volume in whole blood?