When it comes to taste, the gams on sea robin fishes have crustaceans beat by a mile.
The strange creatures are notable for being fish that use their six leg-like appendages to walk on the seafloor.
In actuality, the legs are oddly shaped pectoral fins.
A sea robin is seen here, shortly before writing a Yelp review.© Anik Grearson
Bellono and his colleagues were able to figure this out through a simple experiment.
They took sea robins and placed them in tanks, where they had buried mussels.
As a control, they also placed capsules containing nothing but sea water.
Sure enough, the fish dug up the mussels, but not the capsules.
Once again, the sea robins were observed digging up what their legs touched.
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We studied walking fish with legs to understand the evolution of novel organs and behavior.
The taste receptors were so sensitive that the fish could detect chemicals diffusing through the sand.
The findings were so weird that the marine biologists needed to publish two papers to sum them up.
Both were published in the journalCurrent Biology.
In thefirst, they summarized their experiments and described the complex sensory systems in the sea robins legs.
After all, thats where the food goes.
Yet the presence of taste receptors in strange places isnt uncommon.
That was the question they set out to answer in thesecondstudy.
To do so, they dove into the genes of sea robins.
They found a protein called tbx3a, which is involved in how DNA gets transcribed into messenger RNA.
Thats how evolution works: by tinkering with old pieces to build new things.
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