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Your legs may help you get around, but what if they could also help you sniff out a snack? That’s a trick achieved by a fish called the sea robin. The fish, which lives on the seafloor, has an unusual appearance, with wing-like fins and leg-like appendages that it uses to walk along the ocean bottom. But in work in the journal Current Biology, researchers report that those legs are also chemical sensing organs that can taste for prey buried under the sand.

Dr. Nicholas Bellono, a professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard, first learned of the unusual fish on a visit to the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where he was planning to obtain squid and octopus for another research project. MBL workers [Scott Bennett] showed Bellono and colleagues the sea robin, and explained that they have a reputation for being able to locate hidden prey—to the point that other organisms will follow the sea robin, hoping to get in on the meal.

The intrigued researchers brought some sea robins back to the lab, and began a series of experiments to better understand their prey-sniffing abilities.

More coverage of this research report, whose co-authors include ǧ����Ƶ Whitman Scientist and former Grass Fellow is here: