September 23, 2024
2 min read
Cave Fish Adolescence Means Sprouting Taste Buds in Weird Places
Cave fish develop taste buds on their heads and chins—and even in humans, taste cells grow in truly unexpected locations
In eastern Mexico’s underground caverns and streams, a blind fish undergoes a peculiar adolescence: as it approaches maturity, taste buds begin to sprout under its chin and on top of its head, creeping toward its back.
“It’s a pretty wild amplification of the sensory system of taste,” says Josh Gross, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Cincinnati and a co-author of a recent study on the cave fish in Nature Communications Biology. Gross and his team discovered that the new buds blossom around the time when the fish transition from eating larval crustaceans to gobbling up their adulthood staple: bat guano. Taste buds outside their mouths might be helping the fish detect bat droppings in the utterly dark, “food-starved” caves, Gross says.
Wandering taste buds aren’t unheard of elsewhere, especially in other fish. Some damselfish cultivate taste buds on their fins, and channel catfish have them across their midsections. And as alien as it may seem, many cells throughout the human body can taste, too. They’re just not sharing the flavors with your brain like taste buds do.
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