{"id":37233,"date":"2015-02-19T11:32:25","date_gmt":"2015-02-19T11:32:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.massarate.ma\/?p=37233"},"modified":"2015-02-19T11:32:25","modified_gmt":"2015-02-19T11:32:25","slug":"penguins-can-barely-taste-anything-at-all-study-finds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.massarate.ma\/penguins-can-barely-taste-anything-at-all-study-finds.html","title":{"rendered":"Penguins can barely taste anything at all, study finds"},"content":{"rendered":"
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They might look classy in those little tuxedos, but it turns out that penguins are pretty much tasteless. According to a new study in Current Biology<\/a>, penguins may have lost three of the five basic tastes that humans hold dear.<\/p>\n “Penguins eat fish, so you would guess that they need the umami receptor genes, but for some reason they don’t have them,” study author Jianzhi “George” Zhang of the University of Michigan said in a statement<\/a>. Penguins in the study lacked receptors for detecting umami flavors — that quintessential meaty taste that makes foods full of MSG so delicious<\/a> — which you would think would be important for enjoying fish. In fact, penguins lacked receptors for all tastes except salty and sour. “These findings are surprising and puzzling, and we do not have a good explanation for them,” Zhang said.\u00a0“But we have a few ideas.”<\/p>\n It’s not unusual for birds to lack taste receptors for sweet foods, but penguins may be unique in their inability to taste bitter and umami flavors.<\/p>\n This may be because of the chilly environment from which all penguins — even the ones who now live further south — once hailed. The receptors for the three missing tastes don’t work very well in the cold, so it’s possible that penguins never really had much use for them in the first place.<\/p>\n If the environment doesn’t let an animal take advantage of one of their senses, they’re not going to rely on it for anything important. So over time, instead of natural selection honing that ability to taste sweets and meats, the ability could actually get weaker: If there’s no evolutionary downside to being horrible at tasting your fish, then penguins are just as likely to pass on\u00a0bad\u00a0<\/em>taste genes as they are to pass on the good ones.<\/p>\n This study only looked at the genes that allow taste to exist, so researchers will have to do more hands-on research to confirm what tastes penguins can and can’t detect.<\/p>\n