What animal do you think has the most taste buds? There are bunches
of animals out there, so let’s make it a bit easier. What sorts of animals
do you think would need more taste
buds? Omnivores might be a good choice, since they eat more different kinds of
foods.
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Cows
are big, so they have big tongues. It isn’t too surprising
that
they have many taste buds. However, the density (number
per
unit area) is higher than most animals too, since they eat
plants,
and they have to pick the non-poisonous plants from the
poisonous.
Some people eat beef tongue – Bill Cosby said he
didn’t
want to taste anything that might taste him back. I would
add
that I don’t want to eat anything that could have been
in a cow’s nose.
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Let’s take a survey of animals and see if a pattern
develops. Humans have about 10,000 taste buds on average. Young people have more than the elderly; you lose about
half your taste buds by age 65. Women generally have more than men. And
supertasters can have double the number of non-tasters. But 10,000 is a good
number to go by.
Pigs have about 15,000 taste buds while cows have 25,000
and rabbits average 17,000. Lions and other cats come in at about 450 taste
buds, but dogs fair better, averaging about 1200. Birds have very few and some
fish have alot, but we will talk about them below.
Sort the numbers out and it appears that herbivores have the
highest number of taste buds, carnivores and insectivores the fewest, and
omnivores lie somewhere in the middle. It looks like keeping an eye (or tongue)
out for poisonous plants is the most important mechanism for taste. Carnivores’
strict diet means they need fewer, as we saw when we discussed the loss of
sweet taste receptors in cats.
But the winner in the taste bud count? Believe it or not –
catfish! Even small catfish (6 in/15 cm) have about 250,000 taste buds. They
are literally covered in taste buds. Mind you, we’re talking about taste buds,
not just taste receptor cells like we discussed last week. These are
full-fledged taste buds, with at least five different tastes represented
(sweet, salt, bitter, sour, umami).
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On
this light colored fish skin, you can see the dots that
are
the microscopic taste buds. I eat fish skin, but I don’t
equate
it to eating cow tongue.
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That’s pretty much it for fish with scales, but catfish,
sharks, and some other fish don’t have scales, they are covered with tissue
that is more like skin. In these kinds of fishes, it’s like their tongues have
migrated all over their bodies. They taste with everything – mouth, lips,
gills, fins, body, tail, whiskers.
The catfish, as ironic as it may be, doesn’t have taste buds
on its tongue! Why would it be important for catfish to have so many taste buds
but none on their tongues? It’s because they live in muddy water. Their sight is
impaired, so the taste buds on their body allow them to find food. In truth,
most fish have very few taste buds on their tongue (called a basihyal amongst ichthyologists).
This is fortuitous for a fish parasite called Cymothoa exigua. It may sound disgusting, but this isopod (iso = identical, and pod = foot)
parasite makes its living by getting into a fish’s mouth through its gills, eating
its tongue and then replacing the missing tongue with its own body. Now,
everything that comes into the fish’s mouth can be nibbled on by the parasite.
C. exigua doesn’t
so much eat its host’s tongue as it causes it to disappear. It grabs on to the tongue,
and sucks the blood out of it. The longer this goes on, the more the tongue
atrophies (a = no, and trophic = feeding) and shrinks away to
nothing. Then the parasite grabs hold of the stump with its back legs and takes its place.
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An
amazing picture of the isopod parasite C.
exigua acting
as
the tongue of a captured fish. It lives in the gulf of
California
and usually selects the rose snapper as a host.
Every
once in a while, a fish lands in the grocery store
with
a parasite still hanging on, looking for the next meal.
I’m
guessing that fish gets returned and a lot of store
credit is issued. Photo credit to Dr. Nico Smit.
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We know that taste is important for animals to separate toxins from those foods that are good for them, so it is probably fortunate
that fish don’t use their tongue for tasting. If losing their tongue caused
fish to die more often from ingested poisons or from starvation, then the
parasite would be sealing its own fate – it wants its host to survive.
Moving on to something a little less disgusting. We talkedlast week about solitary chemosensory cells and their work in non-gustatory
organs. An interesting 2013 paper studied the SCC and taste buds of fish and
compared them to those of mammals. Their results indicate that taste buds did
not evolve from SCCs or vice versa, the two developed independently. This means
that taste, smell and nutrient sensing all developed on their own, yet they
have similar and overlapping structures and functions. A good smell idea is a
good taste idea.
Snakes show again the similarities between taste and smell.
Most snakes (some sea snakes excepted) have taste buds, often lined up near
their teeth. What is different is the vomeronasal
organ (Jacobson’s organ) for sensing volatile chemicals. Present in
amphibians, most reptiles (not crocodiles or chameleons), and some mammals, the
VNO is for sensing pheromones and other scents.
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On
the left is a cartoon showing the snake veromonasal organ
(VNO).
It sits in the roof of the mouth and neurons from it go
to
the olfactory bulb. As the tongue pulls in molecules, it
presses
the tongue up into the VNO. On the top right, you see
how
the snake spreads its tongue out to pick up as many signals
as
possible. Now you know why snakes have forked tongues.
On
the bottom right, you see that the VNO doesn’t even
communicate
directly with the nostrils, the moth is more
important for this smelling.
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Humans can taste some volatile compounds as well. One nasty example is gasoline. If confronted with gasoline fumes in sufficient density, some will enter your mouth and mix with saliva. If enough molecules come into contact with your taste buds, you will taste the gas – not an especially pleasant taste.
Even more exceptional, you can also taste a gas you didn’t
breathe in. There is a chemical called dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) that is used
in many laboratories. It’s famous for being a great solvent. A solvent is a
liquid in which other chemicals will dissolve. Water is a very good solvent,
but there are many things that are not water-soluble.
Once inside the body, DMSO starts to be metabolized by your
cells. One of the products of its breakdown is dimethyl sulfide (DMS). This
travels around in your blood, but wants to a gas, so it passes from your blood
to your lungs. From here you breathe it out. When you exhale DMS, you taste it.
It tastes and smells like garlic, so if you taste this and haven’t had Italian
for lunch, then you might have contaminated yourself with DMSO - oops.
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DMSO
is a by product of the wood industry and is a great
solvent.
It is polar solvent, meaning that it has a partial
positive
charge and a partial negative charge within its
structure.
Scientists first thought that the sulfur (S) oxygen
(O)
bond was a double bond, but it turns out to be a single
bond
with the excess charge being shared as a huge dipole.
Being
so much more polar makes it a great solvent, it can get
in
between nonpolar, positive or negative structures to
help things dissolve.
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This works out well for medicine and chemistry, as certain
tests or drugs require that the chemical be dissolved. But, if you happen to be
using a toxic chemical in DMSO and get some of it on your skin or mucous membranes
- you’ve now been poisoned and you just hope it wasn’t enough to kill you.
Back to taste buds. At the low end of the taste bud spectrum
are the birds. They have merely dozens (Japanese quail) to a couple hundred
taste buds; chickens and songbirds are especially taste-poor. But that doesn’t
mean they can’t be interesting. In the 1970’s, it was discovered that ducks had
taste buds in a weird place – on their beaks.
Mallard ducks therefore have about 400 taste buds on their
jaws, since beak parts are extensions of the maxilla (upper jaw) and mandible
(lower jaw) bones. The taste buds are located in five concentrations, four on the
maxilla and one on the mandible.
These positions just happen to correspond to where the duck
grasps and holds food as it decides whether it is safe to swallow. Once again,
life is protected by taste sense.
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The
leopard lacewing caterpillar on the left warns predators
with
its bright colors that it is poisonous. This is
aposematism, although some animals
aren’t above
faking
that they are poisonous by just adopting the colors.
On
the right is the crimson speckled moth, it is bright and
patterned,
but it does it for a different reason. This is a
secondary
sex characteristic for attracting mates.
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The bright color says, “Don’t eat me, I’m poisonous.” This
is important because even a single peck with a beak could be lethal to a
caterpillar. Birds learned quickly to avoid the bright caterpillars, suggesting
that birds could taste. This tale is well recounted in the 2012 book of Tim
Birkhead, called Bird Sense.
In a strange twist, there are a few birds that are toxic
because of their diet, the pithoui and the ifrita. We have discussed these birds in terms of toxins. These birds are brightly colored, so they are using
the concept of aposematism to keep themselves safe, just like many potential
bird snacks do.
Speaking of caterpillars, we’ll get to arthropod gustatory
sense next week. It turns out that some insects taste with their wings, while others taste different things based on their jobs.
For
more information, see:
Cymothoa exigua –
do sharks have tongues? Indeed, sharks do have a tongue, known as basihyal. The basihyal is a thick piece of ligament that is situated on the lower part of the mouth.
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