Nia vibrissa is a species of fungus in the order Agaricales. The species is adapted to a marine environment and is a wood-rotting fungus, producing small, gasteroid basidiocarps (fruit bodies) on driftwood, submerged timber, mangrove wood, and similar substrates. The spores have long, hair-like projections and are widely dispersed in sea water, giving Nia vibrissa a cosmopolitan distribution.
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Nia vibrissa was originally described in 1959 from submerged wood off the coast of Florida. The Latin epithet "vibrissa" (meaning "bristly") refers to the hair-like appendages on the spores. It was initially thought to be a deuteromycete (an asexual or mould-like fungus), but was subsequently found to be the sexual state of a basidiomycete, one of the few such known from the marine environment. Since its fruit bodies are enclosed and its spores are passively released, Nia vibrissa was considered to be a gasteromycete and was placed in its own family within the Melanogastrales, a now obsolete order of terrestrial false truffles.
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Nia is a genus of fungi in the family Niaceae. The genus contains three species adapted to a marine environment. All are wood-rotting fungi, producing small, gasteroid basidiocarps (fruit bodies) on driftwood, submerged timber, mangrove wood, and similar substrates. The type species, Nia vibrissa, is widespread in temperate and tropical seas.
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However, a more recent study shows that the morphology of the seal's vibrissae actually prevents vortices produced by the whiskers from creating excessive water disturbances.Hanke, W, M Witte, L Miersch, M Brede, J Oeffner, M Michael, F Hanke, A Leder, and G Dehnhardt. “Harbor seal vibrissa morphology suppresses vortex-induced vibrations.” Journal of Experimental Biology 213, no.
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Folliculitis nares perforans is characterized by small pustules near the tip of the inside of the nose, lesions that become crusted, and when the crust is removed it is found that the bulbous end of the affected vibrissa is embedded in the inspissated material.James, William; Berger, Timothy; Elston, Dirk (2005). Andrews' Diseases of the Skin: Clinical Dermatology. (10th ed.). Saunders. .
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Macrovibrissae and supraorbital vibrissae of Phoca vitulina. A chinchilla with large macrovibrissae. Whiskers or vibrissae (; singular: vibrissa; ) are a type of mammalian hair that are typically characterised, anatomically, by their long length, large and well-innervated hair follicle, and by having an identifiable representation in the somatosensory cortex of the brain. They are specialised for tactile sensing (other types of hair operate as more crude tactile sensors).
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The upper reclinate fronto-orbital bristles are long, the middle reclinate bristles are short, and the lower proclinate bristles are medium in length. Proportionally, the listed bristles lengths can be characterized in a 4:2:3 fashion. The ocellar, post-vertical, and inner and outer vertical bristles are all about the same length as the upper reclinate fronto-orbital bristles. The bristle behind the vibrissa is less than half the length of the upper reclinate fronto-orbital bristles.
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The species is widely distributed in the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific Ocean. Nia vibrissa has been shown to be a wood-rotting species and was first obtained by leaving wooden "baits" in the sea, retrieving them after a period of time, and then examining them in the laboratory. Other records of the fungus have come from a similar methodology, but it has also been found widely on dead mangrove wood and on natural driftwood. Fruit bodies of the fungus were found on wood salvaged from the wreck of King Henry VIII's 16th-century warship, the Mary Rose.
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Whilst these five major groups (supraorbital, genal, mystacial, mandibular, carpal) are often reported in studies of land mammals, several other groups have been reported more occasionally (for instance, see ). Marine mammals can have substantially different vibrissal arrangements. For instance, cetaceans have lost the vibrissae around the snout and gained vibrissae around their blowholes, whereas every single one of the body hairs of the Florida manatee (see image) may be a vibrissa. Other marine mammals (such as seals and sea-lions) have cranial vibrissal groups that appear to correspond closely to those described for land mammals (see the accompanying image of a seal), although these groups function quite differently.
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Recognizing that the array was similar to that of the vibrissae (whiskers) on the mystacial pad (region where whiskers grow from) of certain mammals, they hypothesized that the barrels were the "cortical correlates of the mystacial vibrissae" and that "one barrel represents one vibrissa". Whereas small non-whisker areas of barrel cortex correspond to large and sometimes overlapping areas of the body, each much larger whisker barrel corresponds to a single whisker. As a result, the whisker barrels are the focus of the majority of barrel cortex research, and 'barrel cortex' is often used to refer primarily to the whisker barrels. Consequently, much of this article focuses on rodent whisker barrel cortex.
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Michale Fee received a B.E. with honors in Engineering Physics from the School of Engineering at the University of Michigan (1985). He received a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford University (1992), where he conducted his thesis work in the laboratory of Steven Chu. From September 1992–June 1996 he was a postdoctoral fellow at Bell Laboratories in the Biological Computation Research Department, where he worked in the laboratory of David Kleinfeld on the cortical circuitry in the vibrissa system of the rat underlying the sense of touch. In 1996 Michale Fee joined the Biological Computation Research Department at Bell Labs as a permanent researcher (Member of Technical Staff), at which time he began working on the mechanisms of vocal sequence generation in the songbird.
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