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/2015/08/26/018937.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/08/26/018937.full
AB  - Survival in aquatic environments requires organisms to have effective means of collecting information from their surroundings through various sensing strategies. In this study, we explore how sensing mode and range depend on body size. We find a hierarchy of sensing modes determined by body size. With increasing body size, a larger battery of modes becomes available (chemosensing, mechanosensing, vision, hearing, and echolocation, in that order) while also increasing 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 theoretically predict the body size limits for various sensory modes, which align 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.