ELECTRICAL 'SIXTH SENSE' TUNED TO ATTACK.

PositionSHARKS - Electrosensory system

Imagine having superhuman hearing. You are at a noisy, cocktail party and yet your ears can detect normally inaudible sounds made by your friends' muscles as they lean in to dish the latest gossip--but, unlike normal hearing, each of these sounds causes your ears to react in the same way. There is no difference between the quietest and loudest movements. To your superhuman ears, they all sound loud, like honking horns. According to a study study published in Nature, that may be how a shark's electrosensing organ reacts when it detects teensy, tiny electrical fields emanating from nearby prey.

"Sharks have this incredible ability to pick up nanoscopic currents while swimming through a blizzard of electric noise. Our results suggest that a shark's electrosensing organ is tuned to react to any of these changes in a sudden, all-or-none manner, as if to say, 'attack now,'" says senior author David Julius, professor and chair of physiology at the University of California, San Francisco.

Julius' team showed that the shark's responses may be very different from the way...

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