ArticleScience advances2016
Whiskers aid anemotaxis in rats.
Article in Science advances, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 31 papers.
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Who cites it
31 citing papers in PubMed.
- Vibrissal sensing in mammals in a changing world.The Journal of experimental biology · 2026Review
- Soft bionic actuation explains the functional role of whisking in seal whisker sensing.Npj flexible electronics · 2026Article
- Article
- Follicle architecture and innervation of functionally distinct rat vibrissae.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Self-powered artificial vibrissal system with anemotaxis behavior.Science advances · 2025Article
- A robust and omnidirectional-sensitive electronic antenna for tactile-induced perception.Nature communications · 2025Article
- The canine vibrissal system as a highly innervated and functional sensory organ.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Article
- Three-dimensional architecture and linearized mapping of vibrissa follicle afferents.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Article
- The spiking output of the mouse olfactory bulb encodes large-scale temporal features of natural odor environments.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Supra-orbital whiskers act as wind-sensing antennae in rats.PLoS biology · 2023Article
- On the intrinsic curvature of animal whiskers.PloS one · 2023Article
- The PROUST hypothesis: the embodiment of olfactory cognition.Animal cognition · 2023Review
- How the evolution of air breathing shaped hippocampal function.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Mechanosensory Hairs and Hair-like Structures in the Animal Kingdom: Specializations and Shared Functions Serve to Inspire Technology Applications.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- Continuous, multidimensional coding of 3D complex tactile stimuli by primary sensory neurons of the vibrissal system.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Constraints on the deformation of the vibrissa within the follicle.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- Plume Dynamics Structure the Spatiotemporal Activity of Mitral/Tufted Cell Networks in the Mouse Olfactory Bulb.Frontiers in cellular neuroscience · 2021Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Observation of terrestrial mammals suggests that they can follow the wind (anemotaxis), but the sensory cues underlying this ability have not been studied. We identify a significant contribution to anemotaxis mediated by whiskers (vibrissae), a modality previously studied only in the context of direct tactile contact. Five rats trained on a five-alternative forced-choice airflow localization task exhibited significant performance decrements after vibrissal removal. In contrast, vibrissal removal did not disrupt the performance of control animals trained to localize a light source. The performance decrement of individual rats was related to their airspeed threshold for successful localization: animals that found the task more challenging relied more on the vibrissae for localization cues. Following vibrissal removal, the rats deviated more from the straight-line path to the air source, choosing sources farther from the correct location. Our results indicate that rats can perform anemotaxis and that whiskers greatly facilitate this ability. Because air currents carry information about both odor content and location, these findings are discussed in terms of the adaptive significance of the interaction between sniffing and whisking in rodents.
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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.