Why Do Fingers Wrinkle in Water?
Are you curious why your fingers get wrinkly when you stay in the bath for too long?
#Water #WrinklyFingers #BathTime #CuriousKids
Have you ever wondered why water causes wrinkles on our fingers?
#StayCurious #FunFacts #ScienceExplained
**The Science Behind Pruney Fingers**
What Causes Wrinkly Fingers in Water?
– Wrinkling in water is an evolutionary response to improve grip.
– Nerves constrict blood vessels, causing skin to pucker.
How Does It Work?
– Water seeps into the skin’s outer layer.
– This causes it to swell, but is limited by the blood vessels’ constriction.
Is It Harmful?
– The wrinkling effect is temporary and harmless.
– It reverses once you dry off.
Conclusion
Next time you wonder why your fingers get wrinkly in water, remember it’s just your body’s way of improving grip!
I read it’s evolutionary. If your environment is wet and slippery, then our fingers and toes wrinkle to get a better grip on things. Like a caveman climbing rocks out of a river or whatever.
Your skin absorbs water. When it absorbs water, it expands. However, it can’t expand infinitely because that would pull it away from your body (which it can’t do because of how it’s attached to you.) So it has to expand in a different way. The wrinkles occur because that increases the surface area of your skin without needing to pull the skin away from the stuff it’s attached to.
Wrinkled surfaces have more surface area than smooth surfaces with the same volume. This is why healthy human brains are wrinkly: those wrinkles mean more surface area, and the surface part of your brain is where the layers of special cells (collectively called the “neocortex”) are located. More wrinkles, more fancy cells, more powerful brain.
To improve our grip, like tire treads. The wrinkles make tiny ducts, allowing the water to flow away more efficiently when you try to grab something, giving you more contact
A lot of people still think it’s a physics reaction, osmosis with the water, that your body doesn’t make the wrinkles, they happen to it. But it doesn’t happen if your nerves are damaged – your body has to make it happen, on purpose
No one knows. There is speculation about the grip, but there has been no definitive answer. All we know is that your body does it on purpose, yet the intended function is unknown.
It’s a reflex caused by the body that probably aided our ancestors survive in the past. Think of different styles of tires, unwrinkled fingers are like racing tires meant for dry conditions, while wrinkled hands and feet are like all weather traction tires. In wet conditions, the wrinkles act like the rain treads and water is able to be channeled away from between an object and the fingers and toes. If the water were unable to be channeled away, the water would stay as a slippery film and it would be much harder to get a good grip. Since water is 100% necessary for survival, rainfall is unavoidable, and opportunities to feed as well as travel along waterways encourage human settlement by the shore, it makes sense that humans that have the ability to wrinkle their skin in wet conditions would survive better. If your survival depends on competing for clams in the river the person with better grip will tend to get more to eat. Similarly, if you’re being chased by a tiger in the rain, the person who slips less on wet surfaces will tend to escape more than a person who cant wrinkle and falls because of it.
As other people have pointed out, people with nerve damage to their arms or legs do not get “pruney” when they are wet because the body is unable to send the signals that cause it. That is why scientists think that it’s not just a side effect of being wet but something the body wants to happen. To prove this idea, an experiment was done with people trying to grab objects under water, people who had soaked their hands long enough to get wrinkled were able to pull them out easier then people who didn’t soak their hands first. This helped to show that there is a real benefit to getting wrinkles when wet.
Your nerves. It’s a response to being in water that gives you added grip. There are people that get nerve damage and lose that response.
Well, real answer is that we don’t know. People with nerve damage doesn’t get that wrinkle. Also, some people will get it just by a minute of contact with water which can also be a marker for Cystic Fibrosis. Some get it by merely sweating in humid conditions.
I don’t know if true or not but I learned that we don’t really know. But there are speculations on why. The one that stuck to me the most was since the skin becomes „wavy“ the surface increased. So if you touch something under water, you have more grip, since more surface is touching the other surface and does more friction resulting in more grip. This makes sense for me, but I have no idea if that is the physiological answer or not.
This article explains it quite simply! It happens because of changes in salt balance in the skin. Quite interesting tbh
(Edit: spacing)
[BBC – Why Fingers Wrinkle in Water](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220620-why-humans-evolved-to-have-fingers-that-wrinkle-in-the-bath)