Study Show Penguins Can Only Taste Salty and Sour Foods
New research, shows how penguins have lost three of the five tastes. This leaves them with only salty and sour. These changes seemed to have happened more than 20 million years ago and researchers don’t know why. They think it could be due to the fact that the receptors involved with tasting didn’t function to do the cold weather. Chemicals are detected by cells in our taste buds and that stimulates taste. Taste is actually pretty important for survival in most animals.
Bitter prevents the ingestion of poisonous or toxic substances. The majority of all birds are missing the ability to taste sweet things. Scientists found this out by sequencing their DNA and looking for genes responsible for detecting the different tastes in taste cells. Researchers from the University of Michigan were interested in this topic. They looked at the genes present in two penguins as well as their other penguin species and 22 non-penguin birds. They discovered that all of the penguins lacked functional genes to pick up sweet, umami and bitter.
