A wonderful fish tastes the seabed with its protrusions

Intelligence agency. The word usually refers to state espionage organizations.

But if you think of the word literally, it could also mean animals’ different sensory horns and sensory protrusions that they use to explore their surroundings.

In this picture, we have an American coot. What’s special about it is that it’s a fish with legs. Six feet, actually.

With these legs, the fish scuttles around on the seabed, and to top it all off, they still taste what’s on the bottom. The feet have small taste buds, like the human tongue. That’s just the intelligence agency.

This a truly confusing natural fact is revealed to us Current Biology journal in the latest publication. It studies the evolution of this special fish.

Developmental biologist David Kingsley saw a barnacle mussel in an aquarium and thought that jopas is a strange bugger. The fish’s fluffy pectoral fins resembled the wings of a bird and it had legs like a crab.

“It looked like it was put together from different animals,” says Kingsley for the CNN news channel. It’s about the fish’s movements in the bulletin also video.

Take it therefore had to be investigated. Kingsley and his colleagues studied the fish’s genes and found out that the same gene that regulates the development of limbs in humans is behind the protrusions.

The projections of the fish are still not actually legs, but a kind of pectoral fin extensions that have developed into sensory organs.

Maybe it’s a bit like if human nipples grew tentacles with which we would taste and feel our surroundings. That would be really weird.

The fish floats along the bottom and inquires with its organs if there is food under the sand. The feet have a very sensitive sense of taste and the fish finds even the smallest food scraps.

Researched species, Prionotus carolinuslives in shallow waters on the Atlantic coast of North America.

From there, they end up in fishermen’s fishing lines, and at the same time, the Finnish name of the fish is also explained. So, the mollusk drains when it is lifted from the water.