Call him what you want, but not late for dinner. Scientists have discovered that nature’s quickest eater is one of its oddest looking creatures — the star-nosed mole. The mammal, which sports a crown of fleshy tendrils around its snout, can detect and gulp down its prey at a speed too fast for the human eye to follow, even though it is virtually blind.
The star nosed mole is a small, semi-aquatic mammal that inhabits in the low wetlands of eastern North America. Like other moles, it lives in a network of narrow underground tunnels, and digs shallow surface tunnels where it forages for insects, worms and molluscs. Living in almost complete darkness, the star-nosed mole has poorly developed eyes, and is virtually blind. Instead, it relies heavily on its remarkable star-shaped nose. This organ enables the star-nosed mole to decide whether something is edible with astonishing speed – in fact, it recently entered the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s fastest forager – and also to sniff out food underwater.
The star-shaped nose is a highly specialized sensory-motor organ, which consists of 11 pairs of fleshy finger-like appendages, or ‘tendrils’, and is less than half an inch in diameter.
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