Feeling Nosy

Take a moment to close your eyes and go for a short walk around the room, notice how reliant you become on your sense of touch. Now imagine living in the darkness underground, how much better would your sense of touch need to be? Enter the star-nosed mole, so called for its unusual feeler-adorned nose (this electron micrograph shows four of the 22 tentacle-like feelers). The nose is only one centimetre across but is covered with tens of thousands of highly sensitive, domed, touch organs called Eimer's organs. A pinhead could touch 600 of these at once, that’s fifteen times more sensitive than the human hand. Using the star-nosed mole as a model organism, scientists can get one step closer to discovering the mechanisms of touch and an understanding of sensory loss in humans.

Written by Mary-Clare Hallsworth

Mary-Clare Hallsworth

Writer

Mary-Clare has a passion for communicating science from the inner workings of the brain to Victorian technology. She also enjoys getting messy creating hands-on science activities for education.

• Diana Bautista
• University of California, Berkeley, USA
• Originally published under a Creative Commons Attribution license
• Published in PLoS ONE 8(1): e55001