Smaller Animals Perceive Time Slower

Smaller Animals Perceive Time Slower

           Hello my Science Brothers! Today I will be showing you about a new study that links body size and metabolism to how animals perceive time. As you can see in this figure, larger animals do not notice as much detail as the smaller animals. For example the owl only see the general movements of the chipmunk, while the chipmunks see each others movement at a finer detail. This allows for smaller animals to react to their ever changing environment faster than their predators can react to their environment. I believe this has to do with evolution and that animals that can perceive things slower than others had a higher chance of living compared to other species that are not able to perceive things slower. 

          This study used a wide range of vertebrates to collect their data, they found as body size goes up, time perception goes down and while, metabolism goes up, so does time perception. They measured their perception using a thing called critical flicker fusion frequency (CFF) which is where you use something like a light to see how organisms perceive time. Often they will use a blinking light at different intervals til an animal can no longer perceive the light as no longer blinking. What the study found is that as the animals became larger the faster they would see the light as not blinking. I'm not exactly sure how they would know when the animals would no longer be able to perceive the light as no longer blinking but they were able to somehow, most likely through using neuronal waves in the animals optic lobe.
        I talked about how smaller animals are influenced positively by their small sized, but I didn't really touch on the influence of size and how it influences larger animals. While the team of researchers was mainly focused on vertebrates they did do some studies on non-vertebrates, one of them was a deep-sea isotope, the larger under-water cousin of the woodlouse, it showed a surprisingly slow time perception at four blinks a second it still saw the light as being constant. Other animals like elephants can barely notice anything due to them having no real natural predators they can afford to see things faster with their long life-line and tough skin, they also don't have to worry about their "prey" running away from him.
      What does this mean you might ask, why is this important? Personally I believe it helps explain a lot of things that we were before unsure about, like why can't I ever kill that fly that has been annoying me! It answers that question by saying that a housefly has the ability to react 4 times as fast as I can due to perceiving time at a much slower rate. This means that there is some truth to "dog-years" animals perceive time at different intervals, so therefore their lifetime can seem to be a similar length. This has been another Brother Science Man report!
                                                                                       
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347213003060