The star on the star-nosed mole may look freakish and useless, but in fact it gives the animal the ability to sense electric fields.
For the most part, the star-nosed mole looks normal enough. Stocky and dark and about six inches long, it has a body like that of a garden-variety mole and the same powerful digging hands and poorly developed eyes. But then there is the matter of its nose. Clustered around its nostrils, like petals on a nightmarish flower, are 22 writhing, probing, fleshy tentacles. It is not obvious what evolution had in mind in designing such an organ, and Edwin Gould, a zoologist at the National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C., has been wondering about that question for a decade. But now he thinks he has the answer. Those tentacles, Gould’s research indicates, enable the star-nosed mole to detect the electric fields of its prey.
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