RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Size Structures Sensory Hierarchy in Ocean Life
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 018937
DO 10.1101/018937
A1 Erik A. Martens
A1 Navish Wadhwa
A1 Nis S. Jacobsen
A1 Christian Lindemann
A1 Ken H. Andersen
A1 André Visser
YR 2015
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/09/15/018937.abstract
AB Survival in aquatic environments requires organisms to have effective means of collecting information from their surroundings through various sensing strategies. In this study, we explore how sensing mode and range depend on body size. We find a hierarchy of sensing modes determined by body size. With increasing body size, a larger battery of modes becomes available (chemosensing, mechanosensing, vision, hearing, and echolocation, in that order) while the sensing range also increases. This size-dependent hierarchy and the transitions between primary sensory modes are explained on the grounds of limiting factors set by physiology and the physical laws governing signal generation, transmission and reception. We theoretically predict the body size limits for various sensory modes, which align well with size ranges found in literature. The treatise of all ocean life, from unicellular organisms to whales, demonstrates how body size determines available sensing modes, and thereby acts as a major structuring factor of aquatic life.