So, if I want to swim under water, I can put a snorkel up my behind and still be able to breathe?
Sadly probably not. That article appears to have been written in another language and then translated using something like Google Translate. Certain lines make that clear such as this one:
"no soil vertebrate can perform this trick"
They clearly meant "land vertebrate".
Here is another line that went through a bot of some sort:
"Thus far, Dr Takabe and his coworkers have turned rats, rats and pigs into underside breathers."
Here is what they did to mice:
"To start with,” Dr Takebe and his colleagues attempted that with mice. After anaesthetising their subjects, they scraped away the mucous linings using toothpicks. They then fitted the critters with masks, to limit their air supply, and pumped oxygen in their intestines. Control mice, masked but not so perfused, lived for less than a quarter of an hour. Those getting rectal oxygen lasted 50 minutes."
The mice were still breathing through their lungs a bit. Just not as much as before. The restrictors killed them in 15 minutes instead of three or four that one can survive without any oxygen at all. And one, no one is going at the inside of my guts using toothpicks
