A harbor seal dons a blindfold to take part in an experiment COURTESY OF MARINE SCIENCE CENTER ROSTOCKSeals are expert predators, making use of mechanosensory whiskers on their faces to track the movements of swimming fish over large distances. Now, researchers at the University of Rostock, Germany, have shown that these whiskers could allow seals to detect weak water currents made by the breath of stationary fish, potentially explaining how some seals can catch well-camouflaged, bottom-dwelling prey even in murky or dark water. The findings were published today (January 18) in The Journal of Experimental Biology.
“It’s a pretty exciting paper,” said Colleen Reichmuth, head of the pinniped cognition and sensory systems laboratory at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the work. “These animals are extremely sensitive to information in the environment coming in from many different sensory channels. . . . This [study] gets us a little bit closer to knowing what they’re doing in nature.”
The Rostock team had previously reported that harbor seals can use their whiskers to follow the wakes of fish swimming hundreds of meters away. But those findings didn’t explain how seals could locate benthic prey like flatfish—known to make up part of harbor seals’ diets—which spend much of their time motionless on the seafloor.
One possible explanation was that ...
