Definitions
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun Plural form of
vibrissa .
Etymologies
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Examples
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Though other animals such as dogs have vibrissae, they don't have them in such large numbers and typically only on the face.
Nikolas Kozloff: BP and the Perilous Voyage of Bama the Manatee 2010
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These bristly vibrissae serve to transmit information to the brain via nerve fibers.
Nikolas Kozloff: BP and the Perilous Voyage of Bama the Manatee 2010
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In murky waters, the manatees 'acute sense of touch and vibrissae, located on the face but also all over the body, come in handy.
Nikolas Kozloff: BP and the Perilous Voyage of Bama the Manatee 2010
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Here too are the whiskers vibrissae, which like all hairs have pressure-sensitive receptors at their ends.
INSIDE OF A DOG ALEXANDRA HOROWITZ 2009
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Here too are the whiskers vibrissae, which like all hairs have pressure-sensitive receptors at their ends.
INSIDE OF A DOG ALEXANDRA HOROWITZ 2009
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Also called vibrissae, the long hairs dot their cheeks in a square-grid pattern.
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It seems that rorquals possess batteries of sensory organs within and around the buccal pouch: there are laminated corpuscles closely associated with the ventral grooves that might serve a sensory function, and located around the edges of the jaws, and at their tips, are a number of short (12.5 mm) vibrissae.
From cigar to elongated, bloated tadpole: rorquals part II Darren Naish 2006
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It seems that rorquals possess batteries of sensory organs within and around the buccal pouch: there are laminated corpuscles closely associated with the ventral grooves that might serve a sensory function, and located around the edges of the jaws, and at their tips, are a number of short (12.5 mm) vibrissae.
Archive 2006-10-01 Darren Naish 2006
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An additional 3,000 vibrissae are spaced less densely over the rest of the body.
Manatees 2006
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These clusters, the researchers suspect, are the manatee equivalents of the cell groupings called barrels found in other whiskered species like mice and rats, regions that process sensory information from the vibrissae.
Archive 2006-09-01 2006
sionnach commented on the word vibrissae
cat's whiskers
February 26, 2007
kad commented on the word vibrissae
or walrus whiskers:
"...the stiff, sensitive whiskers that a walrus uses to search for bivalves through the seabed’s dark murk, and that feel like slender tubes of bamboo."
--Natalie Angier, "Who is the Walrus?", NYTimes, 5/20/08
May 21, 2008
trivet commented on the word vibrissae
Best. Article. Ever.
...I watched Sivuqaq, a 2,200-pound adult male, roll toward me like a gelatinous, mustachioed boulder and head straight for my solar plexus.
May 21, 2008
reesetee commented on the word vibrissae
That is one fiiiine sentence. :-)
May 21, 2008
vendingmachine commented on the word vibrissae
What is the difference between vibrissae and whiskers?
"Whiskers are modified hairs (formally known as 'vibrissae') that form specialized touch organs, found at some stage in the life of all mammals except monotremes (duck-billed platypus and echidnas) and humans, though we still have vestiges of the muscles once associated with vibrissae in our upper lips."
February 23, 2023