Dylan Emerson

Dr. Gaddis

BIOL1000 Sec. OL1

6 May 2020

Final Project Unit 6: Animal Structure and Function

As the animal kingdom has been observed, it is apparent that an animal adapts to be

better suited within its environment. Whether it be as simple as an animal developing thicker fur

to maintain warmth in harsh winters or as strange as an animal developing the instinctual ability

to hunt and survive in a bubble underwater, it is apparent animals must adapt to their

surroundings to increase their likelihood of survival. Adaptation most often affects an animal’s

form, which in turn facilitates the biological function and makes an animal’s life easier.

When presented with an environment, there are many innate problems animals must learn

to work around. For many animals, these problems primarily consist of competition and

predators. By evolving to adapt to one’s environment, animals are able to get a leg up on these

problems to make their lives easier and give them a survival advantage. In Carl Ganz’ article

“Adaptation and the Form-Function Relation,” he references bats and moths. Bats can navigate

their environment using sonar so they can be more efficient hunters at night. Because of this,

moths that are hunted by bats have developed the ability to detect sonar and will begin to fly

erratically and unpredictably. The ears of these moths have adapted to hear sonic pulses, which

gives them an advantage over their predators, bats. A much more visual example can be

examined in an arctic climate that is rich with snow and ice. A white fox will excel at hunting its

prey because it is harder to be seen as compared to a brown fox that sticks out against the white

canvas of snow. With this in mind, when all of the snow melts during warm summer weather, a
white fox will be much less efficient than a brown fox. Therefore, the most efficient hunter is a

fox that is white during the cold seasons and brown during the warmer seasons, which can be

seen in arctic foxes found throughout the Northern Hemisphere. This observation has been

enforced in a study by Marketa Zimova, where animals utilizing coat color phenology had a

much higher survival rate than animals whose color mismatched that of their background, whose

weekly survival decreased by 7%. This biological function makes their lives easier by using less

energy on hunting and gives them a survival advantage due to their higher success rate as

predators.

For these biological functions to function correctly, an animal must adapt the most

efficient form that will facilitate the function. If one were to observe animals with tails, there

would be a recurring pattern of utilizing the tail to maintain balance and direction, with high-

speed pursuit predators like the cheetah being the most obvious. Without its tail, a cheetah may

not be able to make turns nearly as tight or as quick because it would lose balance. This behavior

can be observed in dogs whose tails have been docked, where they are initially much more

clumsy until they get accustomed to their lack of a tail. Jacqueline Bennett interviewed a couple

whose dog had to get its tail amputated because it kept attacking it, in an article about docking

tails. In this interview, the couple observed a first-hand experience of their dog being much more

clumsy and displaying less balance until it got used to the lack of a tail. This demonstrates that

over time, animals have developed tails as a means to keep their balance, among other factors.

On a more technical note, one can deeply observe animals by means of an x-ray to

analyze the inner workings of an animal, and how those inner workings are built to facilitate

biological function. This exact process was done by John J Socha and his team in their article

“Real-Time Phase-Contrast X-Ray Imaging: a New Technique for the Study of Animal Form
and Function.” Through this study, Socha and his team observed multiple physiological

functions in live insects by using “synchrotron x-ray phase-contrast imaging,” a much safer x-ray

that doesn’t harm the specimen being observed. One of the functions they observed was the

ingestion and digestion of food. In one instance with a carabid beetle, they observed gut

movements and watched how the food was shifted around within the stomach, demonstrating

how the food is mixed to encourage digestion. This literal observation of the inner workings of

the insects displays how form facilitates biological function, because the form of the beetle’s gut

encouraged peristalsis to move food around and facilitate digestion.

In conclusion, form is a key part of adaptation that facilitates biological function. By

adapting to its environment and mutating its physical structure, an animal is able to make many

aspects of life much easier for itself, as well as create an advantage that will increase its survival,

effectively passing on its genes and reinforcing a stronger species. All of this is accomplished by

forming new physical adaptations that create an environment within the animal to encourage

biological function.
 References

Bennett, J. (2019, October 7). The Truth About Docking a Dog's Tail (and Whether It's

Ever Necessary). Retrieved from https://www.rover.com/blog/why-dock-dog-tails/.

Coghlan, Cecil, and Julien Hoffman. “Leonardo Da Vinci's Flights of the Mind Must

Continue: Cardiac Architecture and the Fundamental Relation of Form and Function

Revisited.” European Journal of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery, vol. 29, 2006,

doi:10.1016/j.ejcts.2006.03.010.

Gans, Carl. “Adaptation and the Form-Function Relation.” American Zoologist, vol. 28, no. 2,

1988, pp. 681–697., doi:10.1093/icb/28.2.681.

Raubenheimer, David, et al. “Match and Mismatch: Conservation Physiology, Nutritional

Ecology and the Timescales of Biological Adaptation.” Philosophical Transactions of

the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, vol. 367, no. 1596, 2012, pp. 1628–1646.,

doi:10.1098/rstb.2012.0007.

Socha, John J, et al. “Real-Time Phase-Contrast X-Ray Imaging: a New Technique for the Study

of Animal Form and Function.” BMC Biology, vol. 5, no. 1, 2007, doi:10.1186/1741-

7007-5-6.

Zimova, M., Mills, L. S., & Nowak, J. J. (2016). High fitness costs of climate change-induced

camouflage mismatch. Ecology Letters, 19(3), 299–307. doi: 10.1111/ele.12568