First, my exposure to biology is high-school. Should the answer to the question

Question

First, my exposure to biology is high-school. Should the answer to the question be obvious - please take a moment to laugh, and then point me in the right direction. A quick google search (or perhaps my search parameters were wrong) didn't give me what I seek.

Animals usually exhibit some form of reflex. What I'm curious about is this - Do all animals exhibit comparable reflex velocity? Here I use 'reflex velocity' to mean the amount of time elapsed between stimulus, and initiation of the reflex action.

Explanation / Answer

Simply stated, the reflex speeds of diverse animal species should not be the same. First, even within an individual, signal conduction speeds actually vary between nerves, on a fairly significant range of about two orders of magnitude. Conduction speeds between species, and likely even between individuals, will differ. Second, not all species possess the same reflexes, which can be, in fact, quite elaborate neural events. To qualify speeds for similar reflexes, one must use closely related species. I did find one article that found the pupillary light reflex in monkeys is essentially similar to that of humans, but this information is not sufficient to speak of the similarities between reflexes in general between the species.

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