Well I just couldn’t resist coming back and re-exploring this crazy faced creature. I posted up a video of him a while back and I felt guilty every time I saw his cute little sniffer that I didn’t write a few paragraphs on his behalf.
Now check out this little guy for an incredibly obscure looking mammal. I feel a bit sorry for him because if you were to chop its bizarre nose off he would just look like a normal mole. As it happens he seems to have 22 fleshy tentacle bits protruding from around its nostrils giving it an unfair advantage in ugly creature face competitions. Lets have a more in depth look at what makes this record breaker so unusual.
The Star-Nosed Mole can be found continuously foraging, tunnelling or swimming for small invertebrates, worms and insect larvae in the wetlands of eastern America and up a bit in Canada. This tiny chap is only about the size of a tubby hamster but, like its regular mole relatives, has a tremendous appetite. Because its diet isn’t very nutritious and in order to cater for its high metabolism and energetic lifestyle it needs to eat a lot, and constantly. This is where that fantastic nose comes in.
Each of its 22 fleshy feelers is hypersensitive, with the longer outer ones slightly less sensitive than the shorter inner appendages. These 22 tentacles are covered in approximately 25,000 sensors called Eimer’s organs that are connected by 100,000 nerves to the brain. This means the ‘star’ nose can move really, really fast. So fast that it can’t be seen unless you play it back in slow motion. It touches 12 different areas per second. The Star Nose can be compared to the human eye; it can paint a very clear sensory picture of anything it smells or touches in extreme detail and very quickly. It can actually determine within 25 milliseconds if something is edible, but often misjudges.
Speed and sensitivity are not the only amazing things the Star Nose-Mole excels at. It can also smell underwater, which not many animals can claim to do. They can follow the scent of their potential prey by blowing bubbles and breathing them back in very quickly. At a bubble speed of about 8 to 12 per second. Don’t try that in your bathtub.
The power and lightning speed of its nose makes up for the very poor eyesight, it can barely tell the difference between night and day, but considering it spends most of the time in the murky depths of swamps and tunnels it’s probably just as well. It also has a pair of monster digging claws to make sure it can keep up with its speedy nose.
Hopefully your cat won’t drag one in for breakfast tomorrow morning. Have a look at this short video to see this amazing creature in action.
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