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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 ...
The physiology of underwater diving is the physiological adaptations to diving of air-breathing vertebrates that have returned to the ocean from terrestrial lineages. They are a diverse group that include sea snakes, sea turtles, the marine iguana, saltwater crocodiles, penguins, pinnipeds, cetaceans, sea otters, manatees and dugongs.
Diving reflex in a human baby. The diving reflex, also known as the diving response and mammalian diving reflex, is a set of physiological responses to immersion that overrides the basic homeostatic reflexes, and is found in all air-breathing vertebrates studied to date.
Crepuscular, a classification of animals that are active primarily during twilight, making them similar to nocturnal animals. 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.
Species that do need to swim continuously to breathe go through a process known as sleep swimming, in which the shark is essentially unconscious. It is known from experiments conducted on the spiny dogfish that its spinal cord , rather than its brain, coordinates swimming, so spiny dogfish can continue to swim while sleeping, and this also may ...
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 ...
Monotremes are the only mammals (apart from the Guiana dolphin) [55] known to have a sense of electroreception, and the platypus's electroreception is the most sensitive of any monotreme. [56] [54] Feeding by neither sight nor smell, [57] the platypus closes its eyes, ears, and nose when it dives. [58]
A common assumption is that Albatrosses must be able to sleep in flight, although no direct evidence has ever been obtained. [ 23 ] This efficient long-distance travelling underlies the albatross's success as a long-distance forager, covering great distances and expending little energy looking for patchily distributed food sources.