Of the many piddly things that keep me awake at night, I’ve been pondering the “structures” in my dog’s ears.
Specifically, I’m wondering about those fleshy little protuberances just inside the ear canal itself. It seems that all dogs have the same structures, with the same shapes in relatively the same places, so what are they for? Why don’t we humans have any such shapes beyond our pinnas?
Are they an organic canine waveguide? Do they serve to attenuate certain frequencies? Do they assist in pinpointing the location of a heard sound by some sort of built in time delay?
What’s the dope on my Chihuahua’s ears, no my friends, not the long pointy parts, or the bony workings around the cochlea, but the stuff between? I’ve asked him, but get little more than a Zen like lick as an answer.
Just a WAG (and sorry for the unintentional pun):
I remember seeing those structures in the ear when my family used to own dogs. Perhaps they are a part of the cartilege plate, there to protect the structure of the ear canal itself? As dogs in the main (except perhaps for those with the floppiest ears) have excellent muscles controlling the pinnas to direct sound into the canal, I can’t see why they’d need the extra folds and tucks within for extra hearing accuracy.
I had figured they were either there to help poochie locate the source of sounds, or they were there to attenuate sounds that may echo or resonate within the ear itself.
I’m continually amazed at what this little dog can hear: I hear nothing, and he’s aiming each of those huge pinnae independantly at a myriad o’ stuff. It’s not hard to imagine the dog sittting there like a sonar array, drawing mental pictures of the aural world around him.
Those are rather odd shapes, it amazes me to think of the evolutionary forces that must have sculpted them…