The Food Washing Enigma Explained
Raccoons rely heavily on their sense of touch to identify the items they interact with, especially food. The nerve endings in their paws help them to do this. A raccoon’s paw outclasses the paws of other mammals in terms of the number of mechanoreceptors, which is a sense organ or cell that responds to mechanical stimuli such as touch or sound. When compared to other mammals, raccoons’ paws have four to five times the number of receptors. When they wet a piece of food it allows them to more accurately identify it. By just touching an item a raccoon extracts almost two-thirds of its sensory data. Raccoons use water in a manner similar to humans’ use of light to enhance vision. Water enhances the tactile nerve responsiveness allowing the raccoon to glean more information about the food. It does this by increasing the receptiveness of the nerve endings that are located in the raccoon’s paw. This is very important because the fact that raccoons eat a wide variety of things means it needs to be able to identify the few things that are not edible or excluded from its acceptable diet list. The scientific unveiling of the mystery surrounding this strange behavior first took place in 1986 through a study published in the Somatosensory Research journal. The study, which focused on 136 raccoons, revealed that when the animals’ paws were wet, their tactile sensory perception increased dramatically.