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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 ...
The question of why prey animals stot has been investigated by evolutionary biologists including John Maynard Smith, C. D. Fitzgibbon, and Tim Caro; all of them conclude that the most likely explanation given the available evidence is that it is an honest signal to predators that the stotting animal would be difficult to catch. Such a signal is ...
Feeding on a dead wildebeest in the Masai Mara. Nile crocodiles are apex predators throughout their range. In the water, this species is an agile and rapid hunter relying on both movement and pressure sensors to catch any prey that presents itself inside or near the waterfront. [1]
Nature is full of many patterned animals, from the stripes on zebras, spots on leopards, to the intricate details on sea creatures.. Researchers have studied for a long time the biological ...
With prey capture times of down to 5 ms (shrimpfish Centriscus scutatus) this method is used by the fastest feeders in the animal kingdom. The secret of the speed of pivot feeding is in a locking mechanism , in which the hyoid arch is folded under the head and is aligned with the urohyal which connects to the shoulder girdle .
The snake strikes at its prey and holds on, pulling the prey into its coils or, in the case of very large prey, pulling itself onto the prey. The snake then wraps one or two loops around the prey, forming a constriction coil. The snake monitors the prey's heartbeat to ascertain it is dead.
Frogfishes capture their prey by suddenly opening their jaws, with a mechanism which enlarges the volume of the mouth cavity up to 12-fold and pulls the prey (crustaceans, molluscs and other whole fishes) into the mouth along with water; the jaws close without reducing the volume of the mouth cavity. The attack can be as fast as 6 milliseconds.
[8] [12] Their bodies are covered by a cuticle (outer covering) that does not contain cells but is secreted by cells in the skin underneath, is made of tough but flexible collagen [8] and does not molt [23] – on the other hand arthropods' cuticles are made of the more rigid α-chitin, [8] [24] and molt until the arthropods reach their full ...