Inside the bizzare

life of the star –

nosed mole,
world’s fastest
eater
Article from National Geographic
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Wahyu Aditya P Gilang Sasmito Dewi Rahmatika Emi Putri Virza Adyuta Ryan
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 Example article:

“Inside the bizzare life of the star –

nosed mole, world’s fastest eater.”
The text is explaining about characteristics of rare animal, Mole.
Inside the bizzare life of the star – nosed mole, world’s fastest eater

A star-nosed mole is surely one of the world's weirdest-looking animals. If you were to come face to
face with one, you might think its head had been replaced by a tiny octopus.And for an animal that’s nearly
blind, the American species is astonishingly speedy: The world’s fastest eater, it can find and gobble down
an insect or worm in a quarter of a second. As the fuzzy little carnivore plows through soggy soils, it bobs
its head in constant motion. In the mole’s dark underground world, sight is useless—instead, it feels a
world pulsing with prey. The mole hunts by bopping its star against the soil as quickly as possible; it can
touch 10 or 12 different places in a single second. It looks random, but it's not. With each touch, 100,000
nerve fibers send information to the mole’s brain. That’s five times more touch sensors than in the human
hand, all packed into a nose smaller than a fingertip. “If I’m using the word 'amazing' a lot, it’s because I
really feel that way about them,” says. In fact, he used the word 10 times in describing them. On Thursday,
Catania will present three decades' worth of research at the Experimental Biology annual meeting in
Chicago, part of a symposium on the world’s most extreme anatomy.
• As the world’s leading expert on the star-nosed mole, Catania is something of an oddity himself.Most
biologists study a relative handful of species, and some even frown upon students picking a "pet." But
Catania makes a case for studying the world’s weirdos, creatures whose amped-up abilities reveal something
about how the rest of us work.“Evolution has solved a lot of problems in a lot of different ways,” he says.
“We can learn so much from that diversity.” (See "Moles Smell in Stereo to Find Food, Dodge Predators .")
For instance, studying touch in the mole’s sensitive nose has revealed clues to how touch works at the
molecular level. Catania has discovered that a giant star pattern that mirrors the mole's strange nose is
imprinted right into the brain’s anatomy. Each time the mole presses its star to the soil, it creates essentially a
star-shaped view of its surroundings, and these images come together in its brain like pieces of a jigsaw
puzzle. “Compared to the other senses, we know very little about our sense of touch,” says neuroscientist
Diana Bautista, who studies pain and itch at the University of California, Berkeley. When Bautista called
Catania out of the blue asking to collaborate, he insisted that she go mole-collecting with him in rural
Pennsylvania. Digging for moles in their underground burrows in a wetland was hard work, she says. The
star-nosed is the only mole species—there are 39—that lives in swamps and marshes. Its exquisite
snout may have evolved to help it quickly scarf down lots of tiny soft-bodied prey in its waterlogged
environment. Working with Catania, Bautista discovered molecules in the mole’s star that help turn a
physical force—whether it's the brush of a feather or the prick of a needle—into the electrical signals that are
the currency of the nervous system. Because many of these molecules are found in people, too, such
understanding might lead to new treatments for pain.
 Summary of text
A strange mouse in the world. He can not see or be blind, and has a star
nose, this species is called Mole. Despite the blindness, the smell is very
sharp. This rat is the fastest eater in the world, he can only fall prey to it in
just a matter of seconds. With a star-shaped nose, it can help in prey on her
food because the nose is sensoreve.
Visualization of text
Unique
characteri
stics
Rare
Mole
animal
 Connecting the text
• Text to Self
• Text to World

• Text to Text
 Questioning
• How the mole nose can sensitive till it can touch works at
the molekular level?
• Why mole live in underground and why it not appears on
the surface ?
 Evaluating
• The article is useful to increase our knowledge about
mole. Because that article serve so many information
abaout mole. That are, how mole survive in the
underground, what the function of tinny octopus in its
nose and