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:
“I have almost forgot the taste of fears.
The time has been, my senses would have cooled
To hear a night-shriek, and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir
As life were in’t. I have supped full with horrors;
Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,
Cannot once start me.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Seeing that the Senses cannot decide our dispute, being themselves full of uncertainty, we must have recourse to Reason; there is no reason but must be built upon another reason: so here we are retreating backwards to infinity.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“Let me obtain forgiveness of thee, Samson,
Afford me place to shew what recompence
Towards thee I intend for what I have misdone,
Misguided; only what remains past cure
Bear not too sensibly, nor still insist
To afflict thy self in vain: though sight be lost,
Life yet hath many solaces, enjoy’d
Where other senses want not their delights
At home in leisure and domestic ease,”
—John Milton (1608–1674)