Senses
The species on Darwin have all evolved sonar, echo-location using a variety of sounds as their primary sense, rather than perceiving light, as most animals on Earth do. Many have complicated cephalons to aid in this sense. The majority have also evolved biolights; but rather than communicating information in the visible light spectrum, biolights on Darwin IV function in the infrared range, as all Darwinian animals are quite sensitive to that spectrum. It is important to note that their sensory organs to detect light in the infrared spectrum are more comparable to thermoreceptors found in pit vipers or rattlesnakes. The Rimerunner still has one bizarre, retractable, atrophying eye, a remnant from a time when sight-based organisms still had a place on Darwin IV. Also, most species are hermaphrodites.
Read more about this topic: Darwin IV
Famous quotes containing the word senses:
“We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves.”
—Denis Diderot (1713–84)
“Those who have been immersed in the tragedy of massive death during wartime, and who have faced it squarely, never allowing their senses and feelings to become numbed and indifferent, have emerged from their experiences with growth and humanness greater than that achieved through almost any other means.”
—Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (b. 1926)
“For certainly he sank into his grave
His senses and his heart unsatisfied,
And made—being poor, ailing and ignorant,
Shut out from all the luxury of the world,
The coarse-bred son of a livery-stable keeper—
Luxuriant song.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)