Biting
Behaviour of opening and closing the jaw found in many animals / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Biting is an action involving teeth closing together down on an object.[1] It is also a common zoological behavior involving the active, rapid closing of the jaw around an object. This behavior is found in toothed animals such as mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and arthropods. Biting is also an action humans participate in, commonly when chewing food.[1] Myocytic contraction of the muscles of mastication is responsible for generating the force that initiates the preparatory jaw abduction (opening), then rapidly adducts (closes) the jaw and moves the top and bottom teeth towards each other, resulting in the forceful action of a bite.[2]
Biting is one of the main functions in most macro-organisms' life, providing them the ability to forage, hunt, eat, build, play, fight and protect, and much more. Biting may be a form of physical aggression due to predatory or territorial intentions. In animals it can also be a normal activity as they eat, carries objects, softens and prepares food for its young, removes ectoparasites or irritating foreign objects (e.g. burred plant seeds) from body surface, scratches itself, and grooms other animals. Humans can have the tendency to bite each other whether they are children or adults.[3]
Bites often result in serious punctures, avulsions, fractures, hemorrhages, infections, envenomation and death.[4] In modern human societies dog bites are the most common types with children the most common victims and faces the most common targets.[5] Other species that can exhibit such behavior towards human's are typically aggressive urban animals such as feral cats, spiders, snakes, vampire bats. Other common bites to humans are hematophagous arthropods like mosquitoes, fleas, lice, bedbugs and ticks whose "bites" are actually a form of sting-like puncture rather than true biting).