Octopuses taste food with their arms

摘要

OCTOPUSES can taste their prey before eating it by using their arms to "lick" it, which adds to evidence that the appendages are analogous to tongues with "hands" and "brains". Octopus arms are lined with suckers that include cells for neural processing of touch and taste signals. These allow them to determine if an animal is good to eat or is toxic, says Nicholas Bellono at Harvard University. That is useful because octopuses tend to "blindly" hunt, sticking their limbs into holes and crevices to find hidden prey.