It's no wonder penguins swallow fish whole: They can't even taste them.
Scientists at the University of Michigan and Wuhan University in China found that penguins can taste sour and salty food, but all penguin species are unable to detect sweet, bitter, and umami tastes. The researchers discovered penguins lacked tastes when they were decoding penguin genomes and found that some of the animals' taste genes weren't present.
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