Hey guys, another one of my threads.
As I always state, this list isn’t going to be perfect, so I always encourage people to make their own top ten-twenty lists with their own research. This is the best I came up with, with my own knowledge and as you know, I am very involved with animals. Please do not take these lists so seriously and just enjoy them for what they are, considering they are just meant to be a bit of fun. With what I’ve studied over the years, I always want to show everyone my own research so it’s all in good nature.
This list is excluding humans.
This list would mostly consist of sharks and snakes, so I only put the two ones with the best senses, but in my write up below said species, I’ve labelled others that would have made the list, reason being, I wanted to show you other animals with amazing senses.
The Top 15 World’s Best and Most Unusual Animal Senses
15. Philippine Tarsier
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The tarsier has the biggest eyes in the world compared to its body size, which for a nocturnal animal, helps immensely. At dark, they can target an insect 6meters away, and can even accurately judge the distance between itself and its prey. They can see so well in the dark that they can leap nearly 20 times their body weight and land with pinpoint accuracy; the equivalent of a human jumping across a tennis court in complete darkness and landing on a bar of gold. Tarsiers also have an incredibly strong auditory sense because their auditory cortex is very distinct.
14. Domestic Pig
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Their eyesight isn’t great, but they have incredible taste, smell and hearing. Pigs have a well-developed sense of smell and use is made of this in Europe where they are trained to locate underground truffles. Hearing is also well developed and localisation of sounds is made by moving the head. Auditory stimuli are used extensively by pigs as a means of communication in all social activities. In studying their taste senses, pigs rejected 171 out of 200 vegetables offered to them because they’re actually extremely fussy eaters. A pigs tongue is covered with about 20,000 taste spuds that can be three times the number found on a humans tongue.
13. Common Octopus
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Octopuses have keen eyesight. Like other cephalopods, they can distinguish the polarization of light. Color vision appears to vary from species to species. Attached to the brain are two special organs, called statocysts, which allow the octopus to sense the orientation of its body relative to horizontal. An autonomic response keeps the octopus's eyes oriented so the pupil slit is always horizontal. Octopuses also have an excellent sense of touch. An octopus's suction cups are equipped with chemoreceptors so the octopus can taste what it is touching. The arms contain tension sensors so the octopus knows whether its arms are stretched out. However, it has a very poor proprioceptive sense. The tension receptors are not sufficient for the brain to determine the position of the octopus's body or arms. (It is not clear whether the octopus brain would be capable of processing the large amount of information that this would require; the flexibility of an octopus's arms is much greater than that of the limbs of vertebrates, which devote large areas of cerebral cortex to the processing of proprioceptive inputs.) As a result, the octopus does not possess stereognosis; that is, it does not form a mental image of the overall shape of the object it is handling. It can detect local texture variations, but cannot integrate the information into a larger picture.
12. Moon Moth
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Moths have incredible senses, but the moon moth has the best. Although all female moths (as well as other animals) release a stream of chemicals into the air for mating, a male moon moth have amazing senses to pick this up straight away because the female only produces a fraction of a milligram of pheromone. By the time the moths perfume has drifted down wind, the scent concentrations are incredibly small. Their antennae are covered with up to 40,000 scent detection cells, and the cells only detect one chemical, the molecules of the females’ perfume. Male moon moths are so sensitive that in one experiment, a caged female attracted 127 males from up to 3 kilometres away in just 3 hours.
11. Jumping Spider
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Jumping spiders have great vision acuity that in fact the human eye is only about five times sharper than them. They achieve this by a telephoto-like series of lenses, a four-layer retina and the ability to swivel their eyes and integrate images from different stages in the scan. In fact spiders and other arthropods have modified their cuticles into elaborate arrays of sensors. Various touch sensors, mostly bristles called setae, respond to different levels of force, from strong contact to very weak air currents. Chemical sensors provide equivalents of taste and smell, often by means of setae. Spiders also have in the joints of their limbs slit sensillae that detect forces and vibrations. In web-building spiders all these mechanical and chemical sensors are more important than the eyes, while the eyes are most important to spiders that hunt actively.
As I always state, this list isn’t going to be perfect, so I always encourage people to make their own top ten-twenty lists with their own research. This is the best I came up with, with my own knowledge and as you know, I am very involved with animals. Please do not take these lists so seriously and just enjoy them for what they are, considering they are just meant to be a bit of fun. With what I’ve studied over the years, I always want to show everyone my own research so it’s all in good nature.
This list is excluding humans.
This list would mostly consist of sharks and snakes, so I only put the two ones with the best senses, but in my write up below said species, I’ve labelled others that would have made the list, reason being, I wanted to show you other animals with amazing senses.
The Top 15 World’s Best and Most Unusual Animal Senses
15. Philippine Tarsier
The tarsier has the biggest eyes in the world compared to its body size, which for a nocturnal animal, helps immensely. At dark, they can target an insect 6meters away, and can even accurately judge the distance between itself and its prey. They can see so well in the dark that they can leap nearly 20 times their body weight and land with pinpoint accuracy; the equivalent of a human jumping across a tennis court in complete darkness and landing on a bar of gold. Tarsiers also have an incredibly strong auditory sense because their auditory cortex is very distinct.
14. Domestic Pig
Their eyesight isn’t great, but they have incredible taste, smell and hearing. Pigs have a well-developed sense of smell and use is made of this in Europe where they are trained to locate underground truffles. Hearing is also well developed and localisation of sounds is made by moving the head. Auditory stimuli are used extensively by pigs as a means of communication in all social activities. In studying their taste senses, pigs rejected 171 out of 200 vegetables offered to them because they’re actually extremely fussy eaters. A pigs tongue is covered with about 20,000 taste spuds that can be three times the number found on a humans tongue.
13. Common Octopus
Octopuses have keen eyesight. Like other cephalopods, they can distinguish the polarization of light. Color vision appears to vary from species to species. Attached to the brain are two special organs, called statocysts, which allow the octopus to sense the orientation of its body relative to horizontal. An autonomic response keeps the octopus's eyes oriented so the pupil slit is always horizontal. Octopuses also have an excellent sense of touch. An octopus's suction cups are equipped with chemoreceptors so the octopus can taste what it is touching. The arms contain tension sensors so the octopus knows whether its arms are stretched out. However, it has a very poor proprioceptive sense. The tension receptors are not sufficient for the brain to determine the position of the octopus's body or arms. (It is not clear whether the octopus brain would be capable of processing the large amount of information that this would require; the flexibility of an octopus's arms is much greater than that of the limbs of vertebrates, which devote large areas of cerebral cortex to the processing of proprioceptive inputs.) As a result, the octopus does not possess stereognosis; that is, it does not form a mental image of the overall shape of the object it is handling. It can detect local texture variations, but cannot integrate the information into a larger picture.
12. Moon Moth
Moths have incredible senses, but the moon moth has the best. Although all female moths (as well as other animals) release a stream of chemicals into the air for mating, a male moon moth have amazing senses to pick this up straight away because the female only produces a fraction of a milligram of pheromone. By the time the moths perfume has drifted down wind, the scent concentrations are incredibly small. Their antennae are covered with up to 40,000 scent detection cells, and the cells only detect one chemical, the molecules of the females’ perfume. Male moon moths are so sensitive that in one experiment, a caged female attracted 127 males from up to 3 kilometres away in just 3 hours.
11. Jumping Spider
Jumping spiders have great vision acuity that in fact the human eye is only about five times sharper than them. They achieve this by a telephoto-like series of lenses, a four-layer retina and the ability to swivel their eyes and integrate images from different stages in the scan. In fact spiders and other arthropods have modified their cuticles into elaborate arrays of sensors. Various touch sensors, mostly bristles called setae, respond to different levels of force, from strong contact to very weak air currents. Chemical sensors provide equivalents of taste and smell, often by means of setae. Spiders also have in the joints of their limbs slit sensillae that detect forces and vibrations. In web-building spiders all these mechanical and chemical sensors are more important than the eyes, while the eyes are most important to spiders that hunt actively.