Drifting lands unique items12/20/2023 At first he thought he had made a simple calculation error. Because the knifefish must generate electricity to perceive the world - something that requires a lot of energy - he expected it would have a smaller sensory volume for prey compared to that of a vision-centric fish. When MacIver compared the volume of space in which the knifefish can potentially detect water fleas, one of its favorite prey, with that of a fish that relies on vision to hunt the same prey, he found they were roughly the same. Being something of a polymath, with interests and experience in robotics and mathematics in addition to biology, neuroscience and paleontology, MacIver built a robotic version of the knifefish, complete with an electrosensory system, to study its exotic sensing abilities and its unusually agile movement. MacIver compares the effect to a kind of radar system. MacIver first came up with his hypothesis in 2007 while studying the black ghost knifefish of South America - an electric fish that hunts at night by generating electrical currents in the water to sense its environment. “It isn’t just telling stories based on qualitative observations it’s testing assumptions and tracking big changes quantitatively over macro-evolutionary time.” Underwater Hunters While paleontologists have long speculated about eye size in fossils and what that can tell us about an animal’s vision, “this takes it a step further,” said John Hutchinson of the Royal Veterinary College in the U.K. MacIver’s work is already earning praise from experts in the field for its innovative and thorough approach. They describe the experimental evidence they have amassed to support what they call the “buena vista” hypothesis in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. MacIver and Lars Schmitz, a paleontologist at the Claremont Colleges, have created mathematical models that explore how the increase in information available to air-dwelling creatures would have manifested itself, over the eons, in an increase in eye size. “It’s hard to look past limbs and think that maybe information, which doesn’t fossilize well, is really what brought us onto land,” MacIver said. Furthermore, it may have had significant implications for the emergence of more advanced cognition and complex planning. This zip line, MacIver maintains, drove the selection of rudimentary limbs, which allowed animals to make their first brief forays onto land. The increased visual range provided an “informational zip line” that alerted the ancient animals to bountiful food sources near the shore, according to Malcolm MacIver, a neuroscientist and engineer at Northwestern University. In air, eyes can see much farther than they can under water. As they emerged from the sea, they gained something perhaps more precious than oxygenated air: information. So when the first animals moved onto land, they had to trade their fins for limbs, and their gills for lungs, the better to adapt to their new terrestrial environment.Ī new study, out today, suggests that the shift to lungs and limbs doesn’t tell the full story of these creatures’ transformation.
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