When It Comes to Octopuses, Taste Is for Suckers | The New York Times

Should anything ever compel you to lick an octopus’s arm, keep this in mind: That arm has all the cellular machinery to taste your tongue right back.

Scientists have known for years that octopuses can taste what their arms touch. Now, a team of Harvard biologists armed with bricks, Velcro and an array of genetic tools has cracked some of the code behind this feel-and-feed feat.

The cells of octopus suckers are decorated with a mixture of tiny detector proteins. Each type of sensor responds to a distinct chemical cue, giving the animals an extraordinarily refined palate that can inform how their agile arms react, jettisoning an object as useless or dangerous, or nabbing it for a snack.

The study, published Thursday in the journal Cell, “really nails the molecular basis for a new sensory system,” said Rebecca Tarvin, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who wrote a commentary on the findings but was not involved in the research. “This was previously kind of a black box.” Read more of the article here.