Whiskers: Milestone in Evolution of Mammals
Baku, November 15 (AZERTAC). Research by the University of Sheffield comparing rats and mice with their families from the marsupial, which suggests that the whiskers were moving a milestone in the evolution of mammals from reptiles.
Using high-speed digital video recording and automatically follow, the research team, which was by Professor Tony Prescott led by the Department of Psychology at the University, to shed light on how rodents such as mice and rats move their whiskers back and forth at high speeds and in different ways actively sense the environment around them, a behavior known as beating. Allows mouse knock or rats to determine the precise position, shape and texture of objects, fast and accurate decisions on what to do, and then use this information to construct maps of the environment.
When running in a straight line, mice and rats move their whiskers back and forth the same amount on both sides. But when running, they through their mustaches movements in the direction of the tower, and the whiskers on one side of head contact with an object, on the other, sweeping round to collect more information. The active strategies to increase the detection information obtained by the whiskers help animals to better understand their world through touch.
In their latest study, the team found that beat like that of rodents, the use of active detection strategies can also be seen in a small South American marsupial - the gray short-tailed opossum. This animal is very similar to a mammal beginning, more than 125 million years ago lived, which is at the same time that the evolutionary lineages leading to modern rodents and marsupials apart.
This evidence suggests that some early mammals may also have struck a mouse or a rat modern, and the appearance of whiskers furniture has been instrumental in the evolution of mammals and reptiles. The research is published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B November 12, 2011, and will also be presented on the same day at the conference of the Society for Neuroscience.
The first mammals were at night, and live trees. To successfully move and grow in this difficult environment of these animals needed to effectively integrate information from different senses - sight, hearing, smell and touch. Whiskers face to provide mammals with a new sense of touch are not available for reptiles that can help them to move in the dark.
While continuing with the similarities and differences between rodents and marsupials to consider is the team with the help of the ideas of the mustache biological sensing animals like robots that use artificial whiskers to navigate without vision. These robots can have applications in search and rescue, especially in environments such as disaster sites, where vision is affected by smoke or dust.
Professor Tony Prescott said: “This research suggests that, in addition to more warm-blooded, the birth of live young, and with an enlarged brain, the emergence of a new touch-based furniture was a facial beard important step in the evolutionary path to modern mammals. Although people no longer have the mustache mobile, they were an essential part of our early ancestors of mammals.”
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