“…Hair shaft movement is thought to stimulate mechanoreceptors at the glassy membrane and in the densely innervated inner-conical body and ringwulst, which are located around the fluid-filled ring sinus (RS) about halfway through the F-SC. How pinniped vibrissae detect mechanosensory signals is poorly understood, since to date functional studies have either focused on microstructure, and innervation patterns (Hyvärinen, 1995;Marshall et al, 2006, Marshall et al, 2014aMcGovern et al, 2015;Mattson and Marshall, 2016;Jones, 2017;Sprowls, 2017), hair shaft morphology and mechanics (Hanke et al, 2010;Wieskotten et al, 2010aWieskotten et al, , 2010bMurphy et al, 2013;Summarell et al, 2015), behavioral performance studies and psychophysical testing (Dehnhardt, 1994;Dehnhardt and Kaminski, 1995;Dehnhardt et al, 2001;Gläser et al, 2011;Murphy et al, 2015;Eberhardt et al, 2016), experimental behavioral studies (Marshall et al, 2014b;Marshall et al, 2015), or studies on individual whisker use in live harbor seals (Grant et al, 2013;Murphy et al, 2017). However, few studies have attempted to integrate morphological, neurobiological, and behavioral data to provide a holistic function hypothesis.…”