Wednesday, November 04, 2020

Goby fins have fingertip touch sensitivity

Groping around in your bag for your keys can be a daily ordeal. I'm not going to list the catalogue of junk in my bag, but I can distinguish every article by touch. Our fingertips are exquisitely engineered, deftly detecting the differences between surfaces and shapes, but we are not the only animals that touch objects. 'A whole host of fishes contact the bottom of bodies of water, plants or other animals using their fins', says Adam Hardy from The University of Chicago, U.S., leading Hardy and his graduate advisor, Melina Hale, to wonder whether fish may also be able to feel surface differences with their fins. The duo publish their discovery that goby fins are as touch sensitive as primate finger tips in Journal of Experimental Biology.

source https://phys.org/news/2020-11-goby-fins-fingertip-sensitivity.html