When we have to decide if a food is still good to eat or has gone bad, we humans use our nose, and so they are most of the animals with smell. How do those who don’t have it?
The octopus, for example, are able to decide whether what they have in front is still edible or not, and now a new study shows that their secret hides in their tentacles, and in particular in windyThat they take the place of a nose by interacting fascinatingly with the decomposer organisms. The study is published on Cell.
Rotten eggs. The intuition for the study came to the author Nicholas Bellono, Harvard’s molecular biologist, observing some female specimens of octopus of the species in the aquarium Octopus bimaculoidesknown in English simply as “Bimac” and easily identifiable because of the blue -shaped blue spots that are on the two sides of the skull. Bellono noticed that The females selected some eggs from their brood and discarded them, removing them from the others.
Analyzed under an electronic microscope, these eggs have proved to be blankets of bacteria: Bellono immediately hypothesized that the mother had them select precisely as “infected”, and throw away to avoid contaminating the rest of the brood. This behavior, among other things, is very similar to what octopus have when they go hunting: it happens that Turn some prey because they are covered with bacteria.
Smell with tentacles. The Bellono team therefore worked starting from this hypothesis. First identified 300 species of bacteria present on eggs and discarded prey; After that, they made these bacteria interact with cells that produced the same molecules that are produced by the tentacles of the octopus when they touch something. THE’Interaction created electric dischargeswhich in a real octopus and not in a mass of in vitro cells would have generated a direct signal to the brain.
To make it simpler, the study revealed that The tentacles of the octopus produce chemicals that interact with the contaminating bacteria of eggs and shellsand when they perceive the presence, they discard the contaminated object. In this way, even if they do not have a nose, they manage to avoid eating potentially harmful food, and protect their brood from bacterial contamination.
