Feeling for food: Can rostro‐mental hair arrays sense hydrodynamic cues for foraging North Atlantic right whales? ...

• Main Authors: Murphy, Christin T., Marx, Marilyn, Martin, William N., Jiang, Houshuo, Lapseritis, Joy M., French, Alison N., Simmons, Nancy B., Moore, Michael J.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: Zenodo 2022
• Subjects: Biodiversity; Mammalia; Chiroptera; Chordata; Animalia; bats; bat; Eubalaena glacialis; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13521917; https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.13521917

(Uploaded by Plazi for the Bat Literature Project) North Atlantic right whales (NARWs; Eubalaena glacialis) possess an arrangement of fine hairs on the rostrum and chin that may be used for hydrodynamic sensing during feeding. These hairs occur across mysticete species and are known to possess adequate innervation in the subdermal follicle to support their consideration as sensory hairs (vibrissae). However, the small size of the hair structure with respect to the enormous scale of the animal's body has caused doubts regarding their utility and prompted speculation that the hairs may be vestigial or minimally functional. Here we show that NARW hairs occur in abundance on the leading surface of the head in a unique and characteristic arrangement. We consider the sensory hairs in context of the fluid environment in which this species forages and argue that the size of the hair is scaled to the size of the animal's small planktonic prey, thus suggesting that the hairs play an important role in the sensory ...