clearly a mechanical functioning. Eimer’s organ is a sensory structure also found in nearly all of the approximately 30 species of mole, however none contains as many as in Condylura. This large amount of specialized receptors makes the star ultrasensitive – about 6 times more sensitive than the human hand, which contains about 17,000 receptors. Each Eimer’s organ is supplied by a number of primary afferents, thus the star is densely innervated. It is associated with a Merkel cell-neurite complex at the base of the cell column, a lamellated corpuscle in the dermis just below the column and a series of free nerve endings that originate from myelinated fibers in the dermis, run through the central column and end in a ring of terminal swellings just below the outer keratinized skin surface. All 25,000 Eimer’s organs distributed along the surface of the star have this basic structure in all 22 appendages. Nevertheless, the fovea region (11th pair of rays), which is shorter in area, has a lower density of these organs – 900 Eimer's organs on its surface while some of the lateral rays have over 1500. This may sound contradictory with the fact that this region has higher resolution and an important role in foraging behavior. However, instead of having more sensory organs this fovea region uses a different approach in which a skin surface may be more sensitive to mechanoreceptic input; it has more innervation density. Rays 1 through 9 each has about 4 fibers per Eimer's organ, while rays 10 and 11 have significantly higher innervation densities of 5.6 and 7.1 fibers per organ, respectively, revealing how the sensory periphery is differentially specialized across the star. The myelinated fibers innervating the 11 rays were photographed and counted from an enlarged photomontage by Catania and colleagues. The total number of myelinated fibers for half of the star ranged from 53,050 to 93–94; hence the total fibers for the entire star vary from roughly 106,000 to 117,000. This means that tactile information from the environment is transmitted to the somatosensory neocortex rapidly. This would be insufficient without an adequate processing system, but in the star-nosed mole, the processing also occurs at a very high speed almost approaching the upper limit at which nervous systems are capable of functioning. The threshold at which the mole can decide whether or not something is edible is of 25 milliseconds: 12 milliseconds to