Seals detect breathing of hidden fish prey

摘要

IT'S a slasher film scenario playing out in nature. Harbour seals use their whiskers to follow underwater currents rippling away from the gills of fish so they can track down and kill their next victims. Until now it wasn't clear how seals locate and catch bottom-dwelling flatfish that hide beneath the sand. "We have solved a long-standing riddle," says Wolf Hanke, the biologist at the University of Rostock, Germany, who led the study. "These flatfish are very cryptic. They burrow in the ground and they're covered with sand or silt, but the seals still grab them."