People have different tastes. It turns out that octopuses, squid and cuttlefish do too.
But octopuses don’t seem to find all greasy molecules tasty. In one experiment, the researchers tested the response of a severed tentacle to one such chemical. The arm crawled off the measuring apparatus and right out of the bath.To see if other cephalopods share octopuses’ tastes, the researchers turned to genetic analyses. Octopuses have 26 genes that each encode a slightly different chemotactile receptor protein.
Bitter taste is often a signal that something is spoiled or poisonous, so animals usually avoid bitter compounds, says Harold Zakon, a neuroscientist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Texas at Austin who was not involved in the work. The type of receptors the species have reflect their hunting strategies. Octopuses ”explore everything with their arms,” Bellono says, and likely use chemotactile receptors to guide their explorations. While octopuses use sight to catch prey out in the light of day, chemotactile receptors help them hunt in the dark and to find prey hidden in cracks and crevices, Bellono says. Squid and cuttlefish are ambush predators that rely on eyesight alone.
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