Duck-billed platypus and other animals with incredible sensory powers 

All living things are designed to be unique by nature. Humans believe that we are the only ones with highly developed senses. However, nature has gifted some other creatures with incredible super senses too! Super senses are any five basic senses of taste, touch, sight, smell, and hearing, with heightened sensitivity. Some frequently preyed upon animals have highly evolved sensory organs to detect and survive danger. For instance, starfish use their arms to see, snakes use their tongue to smell, crickets hear from their legs, and butterflies taste nectar with their tiny legs. Amazing, isn’t it? To summarise, super senses are essential for their survival! Here are four animals with super senses! 

Duck-billed platypus detects electrical pulses 
The duck-billed platypus, an animal believed to be a hoax for years and belonging to Ornithorhynchus anatinus, is an amphibian thriving in the lakes and rivers of Tasmania and eastern Australia. This squat-bodied platypus has a duck-like snout, tiny legs with webbed feet, and a beaver-like tail. As it's toothless, it crushes its food, i.e., other aquatic fauna with the ridges in its bill.  

What's unique about platypuses is their technique of finding their prey using electroreception. Platypuses seek prey in muddy rivers and streams using tens of thousands of mechanoreceptors and electroreceptors in their bill skin. They are the only mammals on Earth that use electrical impulses to locate objects in the darkest and deepest waters. It's the “bill” that gives them this superpower. Three different kinds of receptor cells are crammed into this super-sensory bill. The platypus uses them to detect movements and minute electric fields created by movement of its prey.  

Snakes is capable of infrared radiation from warm bodies 
Snakes have no external ears, or eyelids. Yet, some snakes can see in a pitch dark night. The two snake species that have this ability are pit vipers and boids. How? Infrared radiation, aka "heat vision" is the answer. These cold-blooded reptiles have holes on their faces known as pit organs. These pits are equipped with membranes that can sense infrared radiation from warm bodies up to one metre away. These heat-sensitive membranes can detect the difference between a moving prey like a mouse and its surrounding environment on a millikelvin scale! The pit organs enable snakes to recreate and "see" an image of their predator or prey, much like an infrared camera does in three dimensions. This thermal vision provides an image clearer than many man-made tools. This is what empowers snakes to target their prey with immense accuracy.  

Octopuses can mimic their surrounding colours 
Octopuses are soft-bodied molluscs with eight limbs, three hearts, ugly bulbous heads, and unique survival tricks! In addition, they have full-range vision without a single blind spot! This is because the entry point of the optic nerve on the retina that is insensitive to light is absent. Yet, their one-of-a-kind photoreceptors make them colour-blind. Due to colour-blindness, their eyes only see black and white. Despite this, they can see with polarized light (light waves in which the vibrations occur in a single plane). Researchers have found that because of their peculiarly shaped pupils, i.e., U-shaped, W-shaped, or dumbbell-shaped, these arthropods can detect colour and mimic the colours in their surroundings. The peculiar pupil shapes allow light to enter the eye through the lens from various angles rather than directly into the retina, enabling them to detect millions of colours. 

Catfish has tastebuds all over the body 
Catfish are equipped with one or more pairs of feelers that resemble whiskers around its mouth and allow them to taste and feel. These fish dwell in muddy and murky waters where the visibility is very low. Now, a catfish has the most incredible sense of taste owing to its 100,000 taste receptors distributed all over its body, including the fins, back, and tail! In fact, the long barbels or whiskers of the catfish have the most taste buds! These enable it to sense minute quantities and pinpoint the precise location of its prey even in murky waters. In fact, catfish with damaged taste receptors cannot feed normally. This makes their exceptional sense of taste essential for survival.