Harbor Seal Whisker Science
Have you ever wondered how Seals can locate their fibsh ("fish" in Pinniped speak - see the video of Egg for educational content on the language of Pinnipeds)? So have many researchers! My drawing of Harbor Seal, with close-up pictures of different Pinniped whiskers What sense do Seals use to hunt fibsh? I am not sure how they use sight, taste, or smell to hunt fibsh, and this is something that I would like to find out more about later in another post. After doing some research on this topic, I was surprised that they used touch by feeling vibrations in the water through their whiskers (called vibrissae). When fibsh swim underwater, they create vorticies, which are disruptions in the water that fibsh make when they swim. See the figure below. Fibsh leaving disturbances in the water as it swims. From the Doctoral Dissertation by Heather Rachel Seem, 2015. Passive Wake Detection Using Seal Whisker-Inspired Sensing. Ph.D. Thesis. MIT/WHOI, 2015-03 ....