Infrared communication has recently been found to be a principal player in quite a few species other than pit vipers (including fire beetles, blood sucking insects and vampire bats). More importantly, the army and air force have commissioned several experiments, specifically working with fire beetles, to understand the mechanisms of thermoreception threshold sensitivity. Thank goodness for the military!!! I have tried to look for information available on this matter, and it turns out that millions of dollars are currently being poured into these experimental studies with aims to improve the current heat seeking missile technology.
As for the vampire bats, it wasn't until the 1980's with the work of Kurten and Schmidt that they began to notice heat sensing structures in species other than the crotalids. The nasal pits discovered in these studies showed that no hairs or glands were present in the area so as to allow for maximum heat exposure. There was also dense connective tissue that served as insulation from the rest of the face, having found up to a ~9 degree difference from the pits to the eyes, a difference of only a few millimeters!!! Looking at the picture below, we can see that these bats actually have three pit organs to allow them for directional sensitivity and detection of biting locale with the highest indicated heat index. This is an ominous sign for homeotherms, since vampire bats can pierce easily through their skin (including ours) without them noticing or giving the slightest stir.
In terms of evolutionary processes, it will be interesting to find out what kind of mechanism could allow for such a specialized sensing apparatus. Studies conducted on fire beetles suggested that pit organs are the product of mechanoreceptors that have evolved over time to specialize into thermoregulatory sensors. The mechanoreceptors are not any different from the heat sensing corpuscles that are found in our skin. In reality, very little is understood of the actual neural pathway that encodes for the sensing pathway, and a clearer understanding could help in the development of technological equipment that will ultimately be more sensitive to temperature change detection.
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