Catfish have taste buds spread across their entire skin, making their whole body function like a tongue that can taste food several feet away.

Octopuses have taste receptors along their tentacles

Octopus suction cups are filled with modified sensory receptors that can bind with a greater variety of materials and transport a wider array of information, such as flavor, from tactile stimuli. These structures allow the animal to search for food as it crawls the ocean floor.

Some animals possess sensitive hearing to help pinpoint prey and map the world

Bats and dolphins produce sound to reflect off surfaces and create a mental image of their surroundings. Owls' faces are dish-shaped to help funnel sounds to their ears, including that of mice moving along leaves or snow. Pinnipeds, such as seals and walruses, hear in both air and water.

Cats have a mutation that prevents them from tasting sweetness, and goldfish rank among the world's supertasters.

Humans have taste receptors throughout the body, including in the testes and lungs, but we don't taste what they detect because those areas lack taste buds.

Taste buds have evolved to fill a wide variety of functions

Taste buds do more than let you experience your favorite food. These peripheral organs can sense the chemical makeup, potential toxicity, and fleeting experience of flavor, giving the body a chance to respond to undesirable chemicals or tell the brain that you should reach for another scoop.

The tongue evolved in animals roughly 350 million years ago

Creatures like fish rely on suction to consume food, flexing their gills to create water currents that vacuum up their meals. The evolution of the tongue enabled vertebrates to completely cut ties with the sea, moving onto land where they could sample new foods and ways to eat them.

Our sense of smell affects what foods taste like and how we perceive it

Scent stimulates our olfactory sensor neurons high in the nasal cavity, and the brain attaches labels to those scents. But when we eat, chemicals from the foods travel from our mouths and throat to those neurons. We have roughly 400 odor receptors, and they can be used to decipher more than 10,000 different odors (or more than one trillion by some calculations), including the nuances of different foods.

Owls cannot move their eyes because they lack eyeballs, having instead developed cylinder-like tubes held in place by bones, which provide stability and lock visual focus when hunting prey.

Humans can track smells on the ground quite well—our ability to crawl is a limiting factor

As part of a scientific bet, neurobiology researchers dragged a chocolate bar across the grass and sought to see if a human could track it—she could. This led to a more in-depth experiment on human olfactory capabilities and behavior when other senses were blocked.

Many parts of the body, including the testicles, have bitter, sweet, and umami receptors

Taste receptors—the tiny cells that report the chemical makeup of external stimuli to the brain—in the testicles don't "taste" in the same way as the gustatory ones you use to determine if there's enough sugar in your tea. Research suggests that these "teste" receptors can sense bitter, sweet, and umami compounds and use that chemical input to control physiological processes or (literally) change direction. (Some users may experience a paywall.)

Biofluorescent animals—those that absorb light, such as ultraviolet rays, and re-emit other types of light, such as neon green—include some flying squirrels, scorpions, sea turtles, and platypuses.

These cells 'taste' danger, trigger immune responses

Taste receptor-coated tuft cells are found throughout the body, where they communicate with and take part in a growing list of biological processes. In the intestines, these taste receptor-studded cells can sense byproducts of parasite metabolisms. This causes the taste receptors to release chemicals that alert the immune system, order nearby goblet cells to produce mucus, and trigger muscle contractions in attempts to launch the parasites from the intestines.

Some dinosaurs evolved night vision and acute hearing for nocturnal hunting

Paleontologists analyzed the fossilized eye and ear structures of 16 theropods, finding that some had owl-like hearing and huge pupils. These characteristics are consistent with modern-day nocturnal species, including nightjars and geckos.

Each taste bud has 10 to 50 sensory cells that form a flower-like capsule

At the top of the structure are thin filaments known as "taste hairs" that bind taste-producing substances to the surfaces of the cell, after which corresponding electrical signals are sent to the brain. Adults have 2,000 to 4,000 taste buds on their tongue.

Mosquitoes even have olfactory receptors on their sperm.

A Venus flytrap's hairs convert sensory touch into electrical signals

A stretch-activated ion channel called DmMSL10 acts as an amplifier, converting grazing contact into a strong impulse that the plant uses to react and close its jaw. To distinguish prey from raindrops or other stimuli, the jaw only closes when the hairs are touched twice in quick succession.

Animal brain studies show brain activity similar to what we'd expect during dreams, but parsing whether animals are truly dreaming depends on how one defines dreaming and how scientists could prove it.

Meet Cystisoma, the 7-inch crustacean with eyes for a head

In deep midwater, roughly 1,000 feet below the water's surface, completely transparent Cystisoma hide in plain sight from predators. Their retinas are splayed out thin across their disproportionately large eyes to avoid detection, and their entire bodies are transparent, difficult to see even as they are held in the palm of your hand. Learn more about the creatures here.

The idea of a tongue map has been discredited, but taste sensitivity can vary across the tongue.

How texture affects taste

Texture is the brain's interpretation of several sensations, including pressure, as registered by our teeth, tongue, and finger tips, and sound, as recorded by our ears. Texture also speaks to food particle sizes—smaller than 35 microns contributes to the sensation of creamy—and the balance between flavor and mouth time, such as the crunch of a crispy chip or the bounce of a chewy caramel.

How the five senses share information with each other

The human body depends on information from the five sensory organs—the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin—to react to the world around it. Each of these organs, in its own way, relies on complex circuitry to send signals back to the central nervous system.

Some animals may anchor their brain cells to specific landmarks to determine direction

In a study of bats exploring a new area, specific sets of "head direction cells" were seen becoming active based on bats' orientation when moving, and this activity became more coordinated over time. Researchers suspect, like humans, bats and other animals establish this sense of direction based on movement relative to known points of interest.

A timeline of the science of taste discoveries

The tongue is made up of four types of papillae—elevated, nipple-like projections that give the organ its rough texture. In the early 1900s, initial research into the tongue's varying taste sensitivity led to a misleading map of the tongue and its taste regions. Over the decades, researchers fleshed out five distinct tastes (and more recently, a sixth).

The deep-sea fangtooth has the largest teeth of any marine species relative to body size

From transparent fish to the heaviest worms on the planet, these seven creepy creatures lurk in the deep sea. Learn all about them and the unique traits that help them survive and hunt.

The fish can climb walls

Scientists in Brazil captured rare footage of bumblebee catfish climbing waterfalls. How they do it is clear, but why remains a mystery.

Some animals may speak because of duplicated connections in the brain

Neuroscience suggests that connections responsible for motion made during embryonic brain development—such as those connecting hearing and movement pathways that allow reactive motion when started—are duplicated and connected to the larynx in some animals. This allows some mammals and song-learning birds to speak, provided they have the necessary physiological structures.

How snake biology allows them to eat prey larger than they are

Possessing flexible skulls with elastic ligaments and unfused jaw bones, snakes can open their mouths to engulf much larger prey, and adjustable airways enable them to continue breathing while their teeth grip onto their food. Through slow digestion and specialized cells that decompose bones, some snakes can survive on a single large meal for over a year.

Electrogenic animals generate their own electricity within an electric organ by changing the pattern of electrical charges in disc-shaped cells called electrocytes.

Compared with crocodiles, alligators are typically smaller, darker-colored, possess a more U-shaped snout, hide the fourth tooth on their lower jaw, have webbed feet, and can move their tongues.

Listen to recordings of different fish species

Scientists have captured and curated this collection of species-specific recordings, helping us gain a deeper understanding of underwater ecosystems. Uncover their sounds, which include a lot of thumps, burps, and grunts.

Turtles' sense of direction comes from sensitivity to Earth's magnetic field and wave movement

Female sea turtles use this ability to migrate hundreds of kilometers across the ocean from their feeding grounds to the beaches where they were born to lay their eggs. Researchers have found that these turtles can reach these beaches despite ending up significantly off course as they detour away from predators or toward foraging territories.

A look at how fish less than two inches long climb up 50-foot waterfalls

Shellears use tiny hooks on their front pectoral fins to grip rock like Velcro and take many pauses to recover energy between bursts of movement. Their pectoral girdle—an arch of bone—supports the muscle system needed for the roughly ten-hour climb.

A dog's nose can be up to 100,000 times more sensitive than a human's, and each possesses a secondary organ for smelling, which helps learn about other dogs when they sniff each other's butts.

The research that led to sour

Scientists are trying to figure out if there are unique receptors that respond to the molecules that make up flavors we associate with calcium, blood, batteries, and other items that often escape dinner menus. Taste researcher Dr. Danielle Reed says the minimum evidence for a taste category typically involves identifying dedicated receptors and then removing them to show the taste vanishes.

Babies taste food in the womb via amniotic fluid, and it may influence future taste buds.

Although consuming saltwater can dehydrate and kill organisms, some fish survive by using specialized gills that leach excess salt from their bodies back into the surrounding water.

What is it like to be a bee?

Scientists have long known the intimate features of bee anatomy: six limbs, five eyes, lots of hair, a long, tasteless tube -like tongue, and wings that stroke close to 12,000 times a minute. But getting inside the mind or consciousness of a...

While nearly all fish are cold-blooded—their body temperatures match their surroundings—the opah, or moonfish, is fully warm-blooded, with a body temperature about 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than its environment.

Mosquitoes drink a maximum of 0.01 milliliters of blood in a single meal.

Listen to what a forest in the Jurassic Period may have sounded like with this reconstructed soundscape, which was created by analyzing the fossilized wings of 165 million-year-old insects.

How birds are becoming research assistants

Through the creation of tiny sensors easily placed on their bodies, birds have served as research assistants for various scientists. With untold numbers of birds sending back data, researchers have achieved greater insights in long obscure areas of meteorology, ecology, and more. For example, weather scientists use high-flying birds to outline the height of the planetary boundary layer, while conservationists track gulls to protect migrating whales. Learn more here.

Exploring bird skulls

Birds inspire us to fly—but what about bird skulls? This collection of various birds' preserved skulls offers a peculiar "bird's-eye" view. See the many surprising shapes of beaks and eyeholes, from mockingbirds to turkeys, in this fascinating visual collection.

Fruit fly experiments helped identify genes responsible for major body development

The insects' fast life cycle and affordability have allowed geneticists to quickly identify which genes are responsible for limbs, eyes, and other body structures by inducing mutations. The same genes may be responsible for different parts of a species' body, such as limb-building genes being responsible for wing pigmentation in butterflies.

Poison frogs get their toxins from eating insects and mice

Other animals, including royal ground snakes, are able to survive eating poison. Scientists study the creative antitoxin defenses in these animals to discover treatments for poisoning.

Fireflies light up to provide mating signals and warnings to predators

Variations in the illumination patterns and flight paths while emitting light have been observed across firefly species. Some species instead rely on pheromones if they are primarily active during the day or have lost the ability to illuminate.

View a gallery of animals found on abyssal plains, hydrothermal vents, seamounts, and other deep-sea habitats.

Sonar, or sound navigation and ranging, uses reflected sound waves to map and detect seafloor features, marine organisms, and other obstacles.

A dog's central sniffing organ is many times bigger than a human's

The olfactory epithelium, located high up within the human nose, is home to millions of olfactory neurons. A dog's olfactory epithelium is much larger—and has more neurons—than a human's, which helps to explain the animal's superior sniffing ability.

Snakes move around by coordinating hundreds of muscles

These muscles connect to their vertebrae, and allow the creature to move in various unique ways. Snakes can slither, move in a straight line, swim, jump and even "fly."

Evolution doesn't want you to see these animals

Invisibility is an oft-coveted superpower that many creatures throughout the animal kingdom have evolved to mimic through transparent camouflage. This article explores the science of this seemingly magical ability. The two critical ingredients in...