Darwin IV - Senses

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:

    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)

    Whether or not his newspaper and a set of senses reduced to five are the main sources of the so-called “real life” of the so- called average man, one thing is fortunately certain: namely, that the average man himself is but a piece of fiction, a tissue of statistics.
    Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)

    “Reason” causes us to falsify the testimony of the senses. To the extent that the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie.
    Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)