When octopuses extend their eight arms into hidden nooks and crannies in search of a meal, they are not just feeling around in the dark for their food. They are tasting their prey, and with even more sensory sophistication than scientists had already imagined.
当章鱼将八只手臂伸到隐藏的角落和缝隙中寻找一顿饭时，他们不仅在黑暗中感到自己的食物。他们正在品尝猎物，比科学家已经想象的更多的感官精致。
Researchers reported on Tuesday in the journal Cell that octopus arms are fine-tuned to “eavesdrop into the microbial world,” detecting microbiomes on the surfaces around them and deriving information from them, said Rebecka Sepela, a molecular biologist at Harvard and an author of the new study.
哈佛大学分子生物学家丽贝卡·塞佩拉（Rebecka Sepela）说，研究人员周二在杂志的细胞中报道说，章鱼臂进行了微调，以“窃听微生物世界”，发现它们周围的表面上的微生物组并从它们中获取信息。
Where octopus eyes cannot see, their arms can go to identify prey and make sense of their surroundings. Scientists knew that those eight arms (not tentacles) sense whether their eggs are healthy or need to be pruned. And the hundreds of suckers on each arm have over 10,000 chemotactile sensory receptors each, working with 500 million neurons to pick up that information and relay it throughout the nervous system.
章鱼眼睛看不见的地方，他们的手臂可以识别猎物并理解周围的环境。科学家知道，这八臂（而不是触手）感觉他们的卵是健康还是需要修剪。每个手臂上的数百个吸盘每个都有超过10,000个趋化的感觉受体，可与5亿个神经元一起拾取这些信息并在整个神经系统中传达信息。
Yet, what exactly the octopus is tasting by probing and prodding — and how its arms can distinguish, say, a rock from an egg, a healthy egg in its clutch from a sick one or a crab that’s safe to eat from a rotting, toxic one — has long baffled scientists.
然而，章鱼通过探测和刺激来品尝到什么 - 以及它的手臂如何从鸡蛋中区分一块岩石，其手拿包中的健康鸡蛋与生病的鸡蛋或可靠地从腐烂，有毒的蟹中饮食的螃蟹 - 长期以来令人困惑的科学家。
