24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Umwelt
In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll introduced the concept of the umwelt. He wanted a word to express a simple (but often overlooked) observation: Different animals in the same ecosystem pick up on different environmental signals. In the blind and deaf world of the tick, the important signals are temperature and the odor of butyric acid. For the black ghost knifefish, it’s electrical fields. For the echolocating bat, it’s air-compression waves. The small subset of the world that an ...Folksonomies: perception senses
Folksonomies: perception senses
David Eagleman on how each species of animal senses only a small portion of the world, and assumes that small fraction is the entire world.
20 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
Skeletal Similarities in Mammals
What a piece of work is the mammalian skeleton. I don't mean it is beautiful in itself,
although I think it is. I mean the fact that we can talk about 'the' mammalian skeleton at all: the fact
that such a complicatedly interlocking thing is so gloriously different across the mammals, in all its
parts, while simultaneously being so obviously the same thing throughout the mammals. Our own
skeleton is familiar enough to need no picture, but look at this skeleton of a bat. Isn't it fascinating
ho...There are corresponding bones across species, evolved into other functions.