What is the function of whiskers on animals?
1 Answer
Whiskers are specialised for tactile sensing and grow in various places on most mammals, including primates, except humans.
Explanation:
Generally whiskers are considered to mediate a tactile sense, complementary to that of skin. This is advantageous to those animals that cannot always rely on sight to navigate and find food.
Experiments have shown that whiskers contribute to object localisation, orientation of the snout, detection of movement, texture and shape discrimination, exploration, locomotion, maintainance of equilibrium, maze learning, swimming and fighting.
Whiskers in marine animals have ten times the innervations of terrestrial mammals, allowing them to effectively detect vibrations in the water. Detecting vibrations are useful when the animals are foraging and may add to or even replace vision, particularly in darkness.
Sensory functions aside, movements of whiskers may also indicate the state of mind of the animal. They play an important role in social behaviour of rats.
