Why do wet dogs shake themselves dry? Neuroscience has an answer
www.nature.com
Deciphering how mammals respond to sensations through their fur could inspire further research on skin sensitivity.

When a dog shakes water off its fur, the action is not just a random flurry of movements — nor a deliberate effort to drench anyone standing nearby.

This instinctive reflex is shared by many furry mammals including mice, cats, squirrels, lions, tigers and bears. The move helps animals to remove water, insects or other irritants from hard-to-reach places. But underlying the shakes is a complex — and previously mysterious — neurological mechanism.

Now, researchers have identified the neural circuit that triggers characteristic ‘wet dog’ shaking behaviour in mice — which involves a specific class of touch receptors, and neurons that connect the spinal cord to the brain. Their findings were published in Science on 7 November.

“The touch system is so complex and rich that [it] can distinguish a water droplet from a crawling insect from the gentle touch of a loved one,” says Kara Marshall, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. “It’s really remarkable to be able to link a very specific subset of touch receptors to this familiar and understandable behaviour.”

Research article was featured on the cover of this issue of Science, with a glorious picture of a brown bear doing the “wet dog shake” (https://www.science.org/toc/science/current)

Research article: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adq8834

Please let me know if there is paywall

  • @angrystego
    1•2 hours ago

    I share your frustration with the election result. I’d like to point out that venting it on strangers and making others more miserable is not the healthy way to go about it.

    • @Dasus
      1•2 hours ago

      I would willingly trade all of my health for an effective way to engage these willfully ignorant dipshits.

      This is the core problem humanity faces.

      It’s what allowed a child raping demented toddler to become the commander-in-chief of the most powerful military the universe has ever known. For the second time.

      https://howtobeastoic.wordpress.com/2016/01/19/one-crucial-word/

      “The higher, pretentious form of stupidity stands only too often in crass opposition to [its] honorable form. It is not so much lack of intelligence as failure of intelligence, for the reason that it presumes to accomplishments to which it has no right … The stupidity this addresses is no mental illness, yet it is most lethal; a dangerous disease of the mind that endangers life itself. … [S]ince the ‘higher stupidity’ consists not in an inability to understand but in a refusal to understand, any healing or reversal of it will not occur through rational argumentation, through a greater accumulation of data and knowledge, or through experiencing new and different feelings … We may say that the reversal of a spiritual sickness must entail a spiritual cure.”