You fill up my senses

I'm taking an advanced course at the moment, named "Sensory ecology". It's not really my cup of tea, since I'm usually drawn to genes and molecular biology stuff but there are some highlights. Hot shot professors from all over the world have flewn over to Lund just to give us 50 PhD students (also from all over the world) a 2 h lecture about their topic. And we have ca 3 lectures per day in two weeks, which of course makes the speakers want to stand out from the other lecturers by telling us about behaviours and characteristics in nature that deviates from what we, as humans, would like to precieve as normal.

Image revised from http://www.nadeet.org/pics/newsletter/goldenMole.jpg

Today, one of the topics where the golden mole of Africa. This is a cute little guy, but it has such bad eye sight that evolution have allowed the skin to cover the eyes completely, which only allows it to distinguish light from dark. And it doesn't like it light, so as soon as the sun rises, the golden mole burrows itself deep down in the sand. Instead of relying on vision, these creatures dwell the Namibian desert during the night, searching for insects to eat. To be able to locate it's prey (that's only present on small grass humps in the sand, which in turn is only present here and there in the desert), they have an enormous malleus (that thing we have in our ears, banging at the ear drum when a sound wave causes it to vibrate) specialized for low frequency sounds. To detect the insects faaar away, the golden mole combine "head dipping" and "sand swimming", which allows it to detect things we wouldn't even hear if we had the insect in our ear canals. Marvelous!