Guess what is the fastest mammal?
It's not the cheetah, the king of speed, or the meerkats that hunt venomous snakes, but the furry, weird-looking little creatures that live underground.
It's called the star-nosed mole (pictured above) and has an impressive 22 fleshy tentacles around its nose.
These tentacles are covered in tiny sensory receptors that can detect a variety of stimuli such as vibration, temperature, and chemicals.
They use these tentacles to scan their surroundings and search for food in dark, damp soils.
Scientists measured their reflex reaction time to less than 5 milliseconds, making it to the top of the fastest mammal, which is actually faster than a human blink — it takes us about 100 milliseconds to blink each time.
This reaction speed allows them to determine whether something is edible or not in 8 milliseconds, and they are rated by the Guinness Book of World Records as the fastest collector.
The reason why starnose moles react so quickly is because their brains have a special adaptive trait that allows them to process sensory information more quickly.
They have a large area of their cerebral cortex dedicated to processing signals from the nose, and interestingly, there is a special channel for this information, which bypasses the thalamus and connects directly to the motor cortex.
For other animals, the thalamus functions like a relay station – filtering and delaying sensory signals before they reach the cerebral cortex.
By skipping the thalamus, star-nosed moles can respond almost instantly to the sensations of their nose, so they possess a faster reaction rate than any other mammal.
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