-
Asked by to Aimee, Chris, Dave, Greig, Laurence on 16 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
-
Aimee Hopper answered on 16 Jun 2014:
it’s thought to be an evolutionary advantage as it provides better grip when you’re in the water 🙂
Cool huh!
-
-
Laurence Perreault Levasseur answered on 16 Jun 2014:
Skin has many layers to it. The outermost layer of the skin is made mostly of dead skin, which absorbs water very easily. However, the living cells, deeper in the skin, don’t absorb water that easily.
As a result, the outer layers of skin swell after a while in water, and want to expand to take more surface area, it’s still connected to the bottom layers, who don’t swell. That’s what causes the wrinkling.
The reason why only out feet and hands wrinkle is that hands palm and feet sole have much thicker skin, and so much thicker layers of both dead skin and live skin. That makes them very susceptible to wrinkling.
-
Dave Jones answered on 16 Jun 2014:
It’s a combination of things! Like Laurence said, some part of it is to do with the skin sucking up water, this process is called osmosis. But, the main part is that your central nervous system (which is kind of like your body’s autopilot, doing all the important things without asking you to think about it, stuff like breathing) senses the water touching your skin and acts to drain some of the blood away from there by shrinking the blood vessels in your fingers (this is called vasoconstriction). This reduces the volume of fluid in your fingers and makes the skin wrinkle (like a deflated balloon). We don’t really know why this happens, but as Aimee said it might be an evolutionary advantage because people who developed this reaction would have had better grip in wet conditions and therefore survive more easily!
Comments