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Old 12-14-2008, 04:51 PM
ksuamy20 ksuamy20 is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2008
Posts: 96
Yeah, it's not that they can't taste or smell, they just don't do it in the same way that we do. For instance, that is why some birds love hot peppers and such, they don't have the adaptation to detect the heat (capsaicin? forgot what the chemical is called that makes it hot) like mammals do. Because evolutionarily it was beneficial to the plant for birds to eat the seeds and not mammals because birds spread the seeds through feces and mammals just digest them.

But I also read that catfish have like 10x the amount of taste buds as humans. For a thing that just swims around and eats whatever organic matter that hits its mouth, I don't know what the point of that is.
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