Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 ...
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 ...
Hominid apes build nests for sleeping at night, and in some species, for sleeping during the day. Nest-building by hominid apes is learned by infants watching the mother and others in the group, and is considered tool use rather than animal architecture. [1] [2] Neither Old World monkeys nor New World monkeys nest. [3]
The distinction is not absolute, because crepuscular animals may also be active on a bright moonlit night or on a dull day. Some animals casually described as nocturnal are in fact crepuscular. [2] Special classes of crepuscular behaviour include matutinal, or "matinal", animals active only in the dawn, and vespertine, only in the dusk.
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]
Top: A male ornate boxfish (aracana ornata). Bottom left: a close-up of the boxfish’s natural hexagonal pattern. Bottom center: fish pattern simulation based on Turing’s reaction-diffusion theory.
The reason why some researchers are skeptical about animals having a sense of humor is that it serves no evolutionary purpose. For humans, it's a bonding strategy. For humans, it's a bonding strategy.
Other fish do seem to sleep, especially when purely behavioral criteria are used to define sleep. For example, zebrafish , [ 7 ] tilapia , [ 8 ] tench , [ 9 ] brown bullhead , [ 10 ] and swell shark [ 11 ] become motionless and unresponsive at night (or by day, in the case of the swell shark); Spanish hogfish and blue-headed wrasse can even be ...