Give examples of the local, neural and hormonal mechanisms that regulate.....

The hormonal and neural responses of the digestive tract orchestrate the movement and digestion of the chyme as it travels from one organ to the next. After the cephalic phase is over, the responses thereafter are governed by the volume and composition of the luminal contents. This is like the chyme traveling along an automatic car wash. Its presence sets off an automatic series of events (vacuuming, soaking, soaping, scrubbing, rinsing, drying, polishing). As it reaches each station, it turns on the new process and turns off the one it just left.

The epithelium of the buccal cavity, esophagus, and anus seems like it resulted from the skin being poked inwards at both ends during embryogenesis.

A liver lobule is like a walled city built on waterways. At each corner the portal triad stands like a way station sending blood in and carrying bile out. Blood flows sluggishly past the row houses (hepatocytes) plastered with stucco (sinusoid endothelium), a mixture of rich venous blood and fresh arterial blood. The houses grab up what they want including the remnants of red cells such as heme and iron. They put out numerous proteins (enzymes, hormones, transporters) into the waterway and drip bile out the alleyway at the rear through pipes (bile canaliculi).

The sphincters along the digestive tube are like security gates along a prison corridor. At each gate, the proper signal must be given for the gate to open, and for the prisoner (the chyme) to pass.