Jose Gomez
AP Biology
Mrs. Gonzalez
28 February 2013
Why Skin Wrinkles When Wet As we all have noticed, our skin wrinkles when it gets wet. New research shows that this helps improve our grip on wet objects. We get the wrinkles from normal everyday tasks like bathing, washing dishes, or swimming. This gives clues to what our ancestors did earlier. They must have spent a lot of time in water for whatever purpose and developed this change. “It could be working like treads on your car tires, which allow more of the tire to be in contact with the road and gives you a better grip.” said Tom Smulders. “Going back in time, this wrinkling of our fingers in wet conditions could have helped with gathering food from wet vegetation or streams,” he continued. “And as we see the effect in our toes too, this may have been an advantage as it may have meant our ancestors were able to get a better footing in the rain.” The old theory stated that skin on our digits wrinkled due to water passing into the outer layer of the skin, making it swell. Now we know that it is caused my constricting blood vessels below the skin, which is controlled by the autonomic nervous system, which also deals with other bodily processes breathing, heart rate, and perspiration. They did a study to test their new theory out using wet marbles. First they picked up wet marbles with normal hands and after with wrinkled hands. They found that the wrinkled hands improved their grip on the marbles and was much more affective. Now