Octopuses Can Taste With Their Arms: 8 Strange Animal Facts Science Just Confirmed

Vivid close-up of an octopus underwater, with detailed suction cups and one sharply focused eye

The natural world is full of strange animal facts that sound invented.

Wombats produce cube-shaped droppings. Bees can understand the difference between one object and nothing. Some elephants use calls that work like individual names. And an octopus can investigate its surroundings with arms that act like both fingers and tongues.

These are not internet myths. They are findings supported by experiments, anatomical studies, and peer-reviewed research.

Here are eight remarkable examples.

1. Octopuses can “taste” with their arms

An octopus does not need to bring food to its mouth to learn something about it.

The suckers covering its arms contain sensory cells that detect both touch and chemicals. When a sucker touches a surface, specialized receptors can identify chemical compounds that are difficult to dissolve in seawater.

In other words, the octopus can use contact to ask: What is this? Is it prey? Is it dangerous?

Researchers call this ability chemotactile sensing: a combination of touch and chemical detection. It is different from tasting in the human sense, but “taste by touch” is a useful description.

The discovery helps explain why octopus arms are constantly exploring. Each arm is not simply a flexible tool controlled from the brain. It contains its own dense network of sensory and nervous systems, allowing it to gather information locally and respond quickly.

The core finding was demonstrated in studies of the California two-spot octopus, including research published in Cell and Nature (Cell study; Nature research).

The confirmed fact: octopus suckers detect chemicals through physical contact. The bigger question: how much independent “decision-making” happens in the arms: is still being investigated.

2. Crows can remember human faces for years

If you have ever annoyed a crow, it may remember you.

In a famous series of experiments, researchers at the University of Washington captured and released wild American crows while wearing a distinctive human mask. Later, people wearing that same mask were loudly scolded and mobbed by crows.

The birds were not simply reacting to a coat, height, or walking style. They learned to associate a particular face with danger.

Even more surprising, the memory lasted for years. Crows that had not personally experienced the original capture could also learn to react to the mask after observing other crows.

This suggests that crows can recognize individual human faces and pass information about dangerous people through their social groups. Younger birds may learn which humans to avoid from older birds.

That does not prove crows experience a human-like grudge. “Holding a grudge” is a catchy expression, not a scientific measurement. But long-term facial recognition and socially transmitted threat information are well supported (peer-reviewed study).

American crow perched in a park, appearing to study a human face in the background

3. Wombats make cube-shaped poop inside their intestines

Wombat droppings are not cube-shaped because of a square opening.

The shape forms earlier, inside the final section of the intestine.

A 2020 study found that the wombat’s intestine has areas with different levels of stiffness. As the digestive material slowly dries and moves through the colon, sections of the intestinal wall contract in different ways.

The stiffer regions help form flatter sides. More flexible regions help create the corners.

By the time the material leaves the body, it has become a collection of small, relatively dry cubes.

This unusual design may be useful for marking territory. Cubes are less likely to roll away than cylindrical droppings, so they can remain stacked on rocks, logs, or other raised surfaces.

The shape is confirmed. The exact evolutionary reason wombats developed it is more interpretive, although territorial marking is the leading explanation (research summary).

4. Mantis shrimp can see circularly polarized light

Mantis shrimp already have extraordinary eyes. Some species can detect ultraviolet light and several kinds of polarization that humans cannot see.

They can also detect circularly polarized light: light whose electromagnetic field rotates as it travels.

This ability has been demonstrated through anatomy, physiology, and behavioral experiments. In one study, mantis shrimp learned to distinguish between different forms of circularly polarized light in exchange for a food reward.

Why might this be useful?

Some mantis shrimp have body patterns that reflect circularly polarized light. These patterns may help individuals communicate or recognize occupied burrows while remaining less visible to animals that cannot detect the signal.

Scientists are confident that mantis shrimp can detect and use circular polarization. The exact role of every polarized pattern in the wild is still being studied.

So the popular claim that mantis shrimp see a “secret” visual world is broadly fair: but their vision is not magic. It is the result of highly specialized optical structures in their compound eyes (behavioral study; research article).

Mantis shrimp emerging from a coral burrow, with highly detailed eyes and vivid polarized reflections

5. A pistol shrimp can create a flash of light with a claw snap

The pistol shrimp’s claw is not really a tiny underwater gun. Its power comes from physics.

When the shrimp rapidly closes its specialized claw, it fires a jet of water at high speed. The sudden pressure drop creates a cavitation bubble: a pocket of vapor in the water.

That bubble quickly collapses.

The collapse produces a powerful shock wave and the famous loud snap. Under the right conditions, it also creates an extremely brief flash of light known as shrimpoluminescence.

The flash is not visible like a miniature torch. It lasts only for a tiny fraction of a second and is faint enough to require sensitive equipment.

Researchers have estimated that the gas inside the collapsing bubble can briefly reach temperatures of several thousand kelvin. This comparison is often described as “nearly as hot as the surface of the Sun,” but the extreme temperature exists in a microscopic space for an incredibly short time. The surrounding ocean does not become sun-hot.

The sound, shock wave, and light all come from the collapsing bubble: not simply from the claw hitting itself (Nature study; cavitation research).

Pistol shrimp snapping its oversized claw beside a faint luminous cavitation bubble

6. Honey bees can place zero below one

Honey bees have tiny brains, but their numerical abilities are surprisingly sophisticated.

In a 2018 experiment, researchers trained bees to choose images containing either more or fewer shapes. The bees learned the general rule rather than memorizing one particular pair of images.

Then the researchers showed them a blank image containing no shapes.

Bees trained to choose the smaller quantity often selected the blank image over images containing one or more objects. They also showed a stronger preference for the blank image when the alternative contained more objects.

This suggests that bees can treat an empty set as a quantity: zero: and place it below one on a basic numerical scale.

That does not mean bees understand written numerals or perform arithmetic like humans. The confirmed finding is narrower and more fascinating: their brains can represent “nothing” as less than something.

The research shows that advanced numerical concepts do not always require a large mammalian brain (original Science study).

Honey bee standing on a flower in warm sunlight, shown in a crisp natural-history close-up

7. Elephants use name-like calls

African savannah elephants live in complex social groups, and their rumbles carry information over long distances.

A 2024 study found that elephants produce individually specific calls that appear to address particular members of their group. Researchers used recordings and machine-learning analysis to predict which elephant a call was directed toward.

Playback experiments added stronger evidence. Elephants responded more quickly and vocalized more often when they heard calls originally directed at them.

The calls were not simply copies of the recipient’s own voice. That is important. Some animals imitate an individual’s sound when addressing them. Elephants appear to use more arbitrary vocal labels: calls that identify another elephant without copying that elephant’s voice.

Scientists describe these as name-like calls, not human names. Whether elephants attach the same abstract concept to these calls that humans attach to personal names remains unknown.

Still, the evidence suggests that elephants can label members of their social world with individually specific sounds (study in Nature Ecology & Evolution).

8. Axolotls can rebuild more than limbs

The axolotl is famous for regenerating lost limbs, but its abilities go much further.

These aquatic salamanders can regrow parts of their tails, spinal cords, heart tissue, lungs, gills, jaws, and nervous system. During limb regeneration, cells near the injury form a structure called a blastema. This collection of cells helps rebuild missing tissues in the correct arrangement.

Axolotls can restore bone, muscle, nerves, blood vessels, and skin rather than simply sealing an injury with scar tissue.

Their regeneration is not unlimited or perfectly understood. Age, injury type, and tissue all matter. Regenerated brain tissue may not always recreate every original connection exactly.

Scientists are studying axolotls to understand how nerves, immune cells, stem-like cells, and genetic signals coordinate complex repair. Humans cannot currently regrow an arm using the same process, but axolotl research may help reveal why mammalian healing usually produces scars instead of replacement tissue (review of axolotl regeneration).

The animal world is stranger than it looks

An octopus tastes with its arms. A bee can understand “nothing.” An elephant may call another elephant by a name-like sound, while a pistol shrimp creates a collapsing bubble hot enough to flash.

The remarkable part is not only that these abilities exist. It is that evolution has produced so many different solutions to sensing, communicating, hunting, remembering, and repairing the body.

And science is still finding more.