Canaliculi
Also called: canaliculus
What it means
Canaliculi are microscopic channels in bone that connect bone cells together and let fluid flow past them, helping your skeleton sense movement and force.
This tiny channel network is how your bones detect loading, a key part of the signaling that keeps bone tissue responsive to activity.
Canaliculi are tiny channels that run through your bones, connecting small chambers called lacunae where bone cells called osteocytes live. As an osteocyte settles into its chamber, it stretches out long arm-like extensions called dendrites through these canaliculi to touch its neighbors. Each osteocyte can send out 50 to 60 of these arms, building a vast connected network across your entire skeleton, almost like a web of tiny stars linked by threads.
This network matters because it's how bone senses what's happening to it. When you move and your bones bend slightly under load, fluid gets pushed through the narrow canaliculi, which are only a fraction of a micrometer wide. That moving fluid brushes against the osteocyte's dendrites, creating a signal. Generally speaking, the faster and harder the bone is loaded, the stronger that fluid flow and the stronger the signal sent through the network.
This is one of the main ways your body figures out where force is being applied and how much. The canaliculi and lacunae together form what's called the lacunar-canalicular system, the physical pathway that lets osteocytes detect loading and communicate that information throughout the bone.
How sure is this?
Graded Established Science: Supported by broad scientific consensus and decades of research. Read each study with its grade in mind. One study is a piece of the picture, not the whole of it.
Where the Academy teaches it
This page is the short version. The lessons teach it in full, with the context around it and a quiz to lock it in.
Related words
Osteocytes are the most common bone cells. They used to be bone-builders but got trapped inside bone tissue, where…
A lacuna is a tiny chamber inside bone where an osteocyte, a mature bone cell, lives and senses the forces placed on…
The lacunar-canalicular system is a network of tiny spaces and channels in bone where fluid moves when bone is…
Interstitial fluid flow is the movement of fluid through tiny channels in bone that happens when bone bends,…
Mechanotransduction is how bone cells sense physical force and turn it into chemical signals that tell bone to adapt.
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