Why Seals Twitch Their Whiskers

Many mammals have whiskers that help them feel out their environments. The sensory experience may include subtle detection of vibrations, such as how elephant trunk whiskers pick up mechanical signals as they brush up against other objects. Aquatic mammals may sport whiskers as well, even though they’re encountering a much more liquid environment. In particular, seals have extraordinary abilities to find prey in total darkness. Using their ultra-sensitive whiskers, they’re known to track the hydrodynamic trails left behind as fish and other potential bits of seafood swim by. The bases of their whiskers boast huge concentrations of nerves—more than 10 times what you’d find in the whiskers of a terrestrial animal. As seals hunt prey, they’ve been observed twitching their whiskers forward and back in a “whisking” motion, the function of which has been a mystery that engineering and technology researchers from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands set out to solve in a recent study. Read more: “What Oceanographers Can Learn From Their Animal Colleagues” Using soft actuators to mimic the performance of the muscles at the base of seal whiskers, the researchers moved a real seal whisker forward and back in a flowing medium. Specifically, the researchers
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