11/14/2023 0 Comments Pleasure in the pathless woods![]() ![]() And, on the other, Umberto’s wits have a productive reference inasmuch they enhance the vividness of his sentience, augmenting his experiential Umwelt or “the phenomenal world or the self-world of the animal” (von Uexküll 1992: 319).īeneath a meadow in Tamaulipas, Mexico, an eastern American mole ( Scalopus aquaticus) is caving a new den. On the one hand, Umberto’s bill makes an abbreviation or sampling of some relevant aspects of the environment. ![]() It relies on Umberto’s ability to pertinently interpret surplus of meaning. Umberto’s electroceptive ‘scanner’ does something far more complex than encoding the position of submerged insects and crayfish. The Journal of Experimental Biology 202: 1447–1454. This underwater ‘sixth sense’ provides Umberto with tridimensional coordinates of his invertebrate snacks, even when he cannot see them. The Australian monotreme relies on a multimodal coupling of 100 thousand electroreceptors and mechanoreceptors located on his bill skin (Pettigrew 1999). “ Umberto” closes his eyes and nostrils, letting the tickling sensations in his bill guide his scanning movements. In the murky waters of a Tanzanian creek, a platypus ( Ornithorhynchus anatinus) is looking for lunch. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118 (3). Cellular autofluorescence is magnetic field sensitive. Noboru Ikeya & Jonathan R. Woodward (2021). Jakob’s picture of England is not incomplete or distorted but grounded, just as well equipped as it needs to be. Understanding the strangeness of physical reality is fundamental for explaining how living beings perceive it in species-specific but analogous ways something known as the Umwelt or the “psycho-biological uniformity” shared by the members of a species (Fraser 2007: 37). The phenomenology of Jakob’s quantum ‘compass’ tells us something about the way our universe works, and the other way around. ![]() Jakob’s eyesight is influenced by geomagnetic fields, using their orientation as a reference to find the way home. A quantum reaction occurs inside Jakob’s eyes, changing the spin of electrons in a type of retinal photoreceptors called cryptochromes (Noboru & Woodward 2021). If he cannot read the terrain below, Jakob will rely on a type of cellular autofluorescence, a ‘super sense’ that aligns with Earth’s magnetic field. Two thousand years ago, the imperial Roman army would ‘enlist’ pigeons like him to serve in their famous feathered communications service. The pigeon, henceforth dubbed “ Jakob”, will remember and update this route for the rest of his life. He is following a quirky personal map that consists of memorized visual landmarks (Meade et al 2005). Despite his unwitty looks, this plumy pilot is no common ‘birdhead’. In the gloomy skies of Cassington, England, a homing pigeon ( Columba livia) navigates at 100 km/h. ![]()
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