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Anyone with a cat knows that furry animals can spend a lot of time grooming themselves. Cats take their tongues out of sandpaper and lick and lick and lick and literally lick and lick hours each day. But researchers are finding out more about what this language does, with its hundreds of tiny, backward-facing spines called papillae.
In a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Researchers at Georgia Tech have found that the taste buds are not cone-shaped and solid, as previously thought, but shaped like shovels and troughs.
"This allows the cat to store and retain saliva in these tiny spines," says Alexis Noel, researcher at Georgia Tech. She and her colleague David Hu used a high-speed video and CT scans to observe how the papillae of a cat's tongue drained saliva from the mouth on the fur.
"When the cat gets groomed, the thorns penetrate the fur and redistribute their saliva in all their hair," she says.
The team also studied different types of cat languages and discovered that the taste buds had exactly the same size and shape on all cats.
"Tigers have exactly the same thorn on the tongue as your domestic cat, but they have a lot more," Noel says.
All taste buds can be created equal, but the ability of a cat to clean itself effectively is not – and all this has to do with fur.
According to Noel, for a cat to have an optimal grooming, the taste buds must penetrate through the fur layer and reach the skin so that the saliva can reach the root of the hair.
"We found that for all these animals, tigers, bobcat and snow leopard, the minimum height of the fur that you can compress will always be lower than the height of the taste buds," she says. "What makes us think that the height and shape of the tastebuds are optimal for many types of furs."
In their experience, only one cat was described as "non-repairable": domestic Persian. The softer the cat, the more difficult it is for the cat to stay clean. Noel explains that this is the reason why many long-haired cats peel and have to be brushed every day.
"The cat is physically unable to get its little tongue spines up to its skin," she says.
Researchers used this new information to print in 3D a brush inspired by the cat's tongue that would have better performance to eliminate allergens from the fur of the cat and is easier to clean. Noel says that these results can be used to make the cleaning of pets – and carpets – more effective.
So what does this new research mean for cat owners around the world?
It's a fantastic species that has managed to optimize its languages to be able to clean itself better than any other animal, explains Noel. "I guess quantitatively, you know that your cat never really smells, but your dog too."
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