Talk:Kinesis (biology)

Taxis vs. kinesis

I dont fully understand the difference between a taxis and a kines since they are both movements in response to a stimula.

Think of it like this. If you smelt some nice food, you could either move directly towards it, or you could simply move about randomly, becoming decreasingly active as the smell got stronger. The result would be more or less the same, though kinesis would probably take you a lot longer to find the food. Taxis is where an organism moves in down a gradient of a certain stimulus, whereas kinesis involves a random movement known as brownian motion that becomes slower or faster depending on the strength of the stimulus. Richard001 02:42, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

In this case it should read that the movement is 'non-directed', not 'non-directional', no? 141.70.82.221 (talk) 22:57, 22 March 2009 (UTC)