By ‘tasting’ with their suckers, the occiputs hunt

Taste and smells in the octopus: How suckers send sensory information to the neurons and to the nuclei of terrestrial vertebrate species

A study has shown that suckers of the octopus can taste by touching things. There are similarities in the way squid hunt and the way they decide whether or not to eat it.

In a second Nature study, the scientists studied how these chemical functions in theopods2. The signaling system in the nervous system may have evolved from those that other organisms use.

“To have so much insight so quickly is really exciting,” says Cliff Ragsdale, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, Illinois. He says that the findings raise many questions, including how the suckers send sensory information to the octopus’s brain and how the brain interprets it.

We discuss some of the highlights from the Nature Briefing. Climate scientists can learn from medieval descriptions of lunar eclipses, how to recover rock from the surface of Mars, and the debate about whether T. rex had lips.

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