In the shadows of the dark realm of the animal kingdom, some creatures possess extraordinary abilities to navigate the world around them.
Eagles spot river fish from wildly high heights, black bears sniff out a morsel of food miles away, and the duck-billed platypus detects electric impulses underwater. However, a stealthy predator outshines them all in the darkness – the pit viper.
These snakes inhabit diverse landscapes, from jungles to deserts, and they employ powerful infrared sensors near their nostrils to hunt prey in the dead of night. What’s intriguing is that they achieve this using thermally sensitive ion channels comparable to our own human senses.
How do these pit vipers perform such high-precision thermometry in varying environments? Yale researchers Isabella Graf and Benjamin Machta might have cracked the code with a mathematical model detailed in a recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“To locate their prey, pit vipers need to detect milli-Kelvin changes in temperature with their sensory organ, requiring the whole organ to be 1,000 times more sensitive than their underlying molecular sensors,” explained Graf, a postdoctoral fellow in physics at Yale’sYale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences in a press release.
Imagine needing to sense temperature changes a thousand times more subtle than what our human senses can perceive – that’s the challenge pit vipers face. They often dwell in deserts, where temperature fluctuations between day and night are dramatic.
Graf added, “How is it possible that milli-Kelvin changes in temperature can be robustly detected by vastly less-sensitive sensors in widely varying environments?”
Detecting predator behavior with a mathematical model
To unravel this mystery, Graf and Machta constructed a mathematical model utilizing statistical physics and information theory.
The model delves into how the temperature signals from a pit viper’s ion channels collectively influence the neuronal response. They discovered a pivotal “bifurcation” point – a juncture where the less-sensitive temperature sensors exhibit remarkable cooperation, and the neuronal response undergoes a qualitative change.
“Near this bifurcation point, we show that the snake’s brain can get almost as much information about temperature as if it could read out the measurement from each individual sensor and then average them together perfectly to get one optimally accurate measurement,” explained Machta, an assistant professor of physics at FAS.
In essence, this mathematical breakthrough explains how a pit viper orchestrates its nocturnal hunt, deciphering temperature changes with unparalleled precision.
The study doesn’t stop there; it also addresses how pit vipers maintain thermal sensitivity despite drastic temperature shifts between day and night. The researchers incorporated a “feedback” feature into their mathematical model, ensuring the system’s sensitivity remains intact during temperature swings.
Graf and Machta believe their model might extend beyond the world of pit vipers, potentially shedding light on other sensory systems grappling with detecting subtle signals in fluctuating environments. In essence, the pit viper’s prowess may hold the key to unraveling mysteries across the animal kingdom.
The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and can be found here.
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