ArticleThe Journal of experimental biology2016
Mechanical responses of rat vibrissae to airflow.
Article in The Journal of experimental biology, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 48 citations in OpenAlex.
- Variations in vibrissal geometry across the rat mystacial pad: base diameter, medulla, and taper.Journal of neurophysiology · 2017Pooled it
- Vibrissal sensing in mammals in a changing world.The Journal of experimental biology · 2026Review
- Self-powered artificial vibrissal system with anemotaxis behavior.Science advances · 2025Article
- Article
- Spatial arrangement of the whiskers of harbor seals (Phoca vitulina) compared with whisker arrangements of house mice (Mus musculus) and brown rats (Rattus norvegicus).The Journal of experimental biology · 2024Article
- Sound-seeking before and after hearing loss in mice.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Sound-seeking before and after hearing loss in mice.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Comparative morphology of the whiskers and faces of mice (Mus musculus) and rats (Rattus norvegicus).The Journal of experimental biology · 2023Article
- Supra-orbital whiskers act as wind-sensing antennae in rats.PLoS biology · 2023Article
- Ethorobotic rats for rodent behavioral research: design considerations.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2023Article
- On the intrinsic curvature of animal whiskers.PloS one · 2023Article
- Mechanosensory Hairs and Hair-like Structures in the Animal Kingdom: Specializations and Shared Functions Serve to Inspire Technology Applications.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- Article
- The Euler spiral of rat whiskers.Science advances · 2020Article
- An Artificial Vibrissa-Like Sensor for Detection of Flows.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2019Article
- Whisker Vibrations and the Activity of Trigeminal Primary Afferents in Response to Airflow.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2019Article
- Neural Substrates of Drosophila Larval Anemotaxis.Current biology : CB · 2019Article
- Biomechanics in Soft Mechanical Sensing: From Natural Case Studies to the Artificial World.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2018Review
- Design principles of hair-like structures as biological machines.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2018Review
- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
The survival of many animals depends in part on their ability to sense the flow of the surrounding fluid medium. To date, however, little is known about how terrestrial mammals sense airflow direction or speed. The present work analyzes the mechanical response of isolated rat macrovibrissae (whiskers) to airflow to assess their viability as flow sensors. Results show that the whisker bends primarily in the direction of airflow and vibrates around a new average position at frequencies related to its resonant modes. The bending direction is not affected by airflow speed or by geometric properties of the whisker. In contrast, the bending magnitude increases strongly with airflow speed and with the ratio of the whisker's arc length to base diameter. To a much smaller degree, the bending magnitude also varies with the orientation of the whisker's intrinsic curvature relative to the direction of airflow. These results are used to predict the mechanical responses of vibrissae to airflow across the entire array, and to show that the rat could actively adjust the airflow data that the vibrissae acquire by changing the orientation of its whiskers. We suggest that, like the whiskers of pinnipeds, the macrovibrissae of terrestrial mammals are multimodal sensors - able to sense both airflow and touch - and that they may play a particularly important role in anemotaxis.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.