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A dragonfly in its radical final moult, metamorphosing from an aquatic nymph to a winged adult.. In biology, moulting (British English), or molting (American English), also known as sloughing, shedding, or in many invertebrates, ecdysis, is a process by which an animal casts off parts of its body to serve some beneficial purpose, either at specific times of the year, or at specific points in ...
Sleep can follow a physiological or behavioral definition. In the physiological sense, sleep is a state characterized by reversible unconsciousness, special brainwave patterns, sporadic eye movement, loss of muscle tone (possibly with some exceptions; see below regarding the sleep of birds and of aquatic mammals), and a compensatory increase following deprivation of the state, this last known ...
Diurnality, plant or animal behavior characterized by activity during the day and sleeping at night. Cathemeral, a classification of organisms with sporadic and random intervals of activity during the day or night. Matutinal, a classification of organisms that are only or primarily active in the pre-dawn hours or early night.
The kiwi is a family of nocturnal birds endemic to New Zealand.. While it is difficult to say which came first, nocturnality or diurnality, a hypothesis in evolutionary biology, the nocturnal bottleneck theory, postulates that in the Mesozoic, many ancestors of modern-day mammals evolved nocturnal characteristics in order to avoid contact with the numerous diurnal predators. [3]
At night organisms are in the top 100 metres of the water column, but during the day they move down to between 800 and 1000 meters. If organisms were to defecate at the surface it would take the fecal pellets days to reach the depth that they reach in a matter of hours.
The primary physiological and biochemical concerns for an aestivating animal are to conserve energy, retain water in the body, ration the use of stored energy, handle the nitrogenous end products, and stabilize bodily organs, cells, and macromolecules. This can be quite a task as hot temperatures and arid conditions may last for months, in some ...
This is the notion that animals need a more or less constant amount of sleep every day, so that if a subject is deprived of sleep one day, the amount of sleep tends to "rebound" (increase) the next few days. This has been observed in zebrafish. At night, zebrafish appear to float in the water column, either horizontally or with the head ...
In clear, light water, their skin gets darker, likewise in darker water, their skin gets lighter in color. [5] At sexual maturity, mudpuppies can be 20 cm (8 in) long and continue to grow to an average length of 33 cm (13 in), though specimens up to 43.5 cm (17.1 in) have been reported. [ 7 ]