PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Erik A. Martens AU - Navish Wadhwa AU - Nis S. Jacobsen AU - Christian Lindemann AU - Ken H. Andersen AU - André Visser TI - Size Structures Sensory Hierarchy in Ocean Life AID - 10.1101/018937 DP - 2015 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 018937 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/05/05/018937.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/05/05/018937.full AB - Life in the ocean is shaped by the trade-off between a need to encounter other organisms for feeding or mating, and to avoid encounters with predators. Avoiding or achieving encounters necessitates an efficient means of collecting the maximum possible information from the surroundings through the use of remote sensing. In this study, we explore how sensing mode and range depend on body size. We reveal a hierarchy of sensing modes determined by body size. With increasing body size, a larger battery of modes become available (chemosensing, mechanosensing, vision, hearing, and echolocation) as well as a longer sensing range. This size-dependent hierarchy and the transitions between primary sensory modes are explained on the grounds of limiting factors set by physiology and the physical laws governing signal generation, transmission and reception. We characterize the governing mechanisms and theoretically predict the body size limits for various sensory modes, which align very well with size ranges found in literature. The treatise of all ocean life, from unicellular organisms to whales, demonstrates how body size determines available sensing modes, and thereby acts as a major structuring factor of aquatic life.