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This is Scientific American's 60-second Science, I'm Christopher Intagliata.

这里是科学美国人——60秒科学系列，我是克里斯托弗·因塔格里塔。

The remora is an unusual fish. It hitchhikes on other sea creatures using a sucker on its head.

印鱼是一种不寻常的鱼。因为它会用头上的吸盘，搭乘其他海洋生物的“便车”。

"So you can see them on whales, dolphins, sharks, turtles. They stick to scuba¹ divers². They stick to boats, to other fishes, other remoras."

“你可以在鲸鱼、海豚、鲨鱼、海龟身上看到它们。它们会附着在潜水员身上。还会附着在船上、其它鱼类和同类身上。”

Brooke Flammang is a comparative biomechanist at the New Jersey³ Institute of Technology and Rutgers University. She says sticking to other animals is a pretty good strategy.

新泽西理工学院和罗格斯大学的比较生物力学家布鲁克·弗拉芒说到。她说附着在其它动物身上是非常好的策略。

"They avoid predation by sticking to large animals—no one's going to attack you if you're on a shark. It's a food source—many of them pick parasites⁴ off of the host they're attached to and eat bits of food that are flying by and poop. And they also have the ability to potentially meet other remoras for mating on the same organism."

“它们通过附着在大型动物身上来避免被捕食，如果你吸附在鲨鱼身上，那没有动物会攻击你。这还能使它们获得食物来源，许多印鱼会取出宿主身上的寄生虫，吃掉在宿主周围游动的食物，然后排泄。它们也有可能遇到同类，在同一生物上交配。”

But now her team has discovered that the fish have another unusual quality: they're sensitive to touch—a type of touch previously⁵ unknown in the fish world.

但现在，她的团队发现印鱼还有另一种不寻常的特性：它们对触觉很敏感，而人类此前从并不知道鱼类中存在这种触觉。

"Up until now we didn't think fish had the ability to sense touch in this way—or to sense dragging and shear⁶, which is going to be very important for a remora, which is attached to something moving very quickly."

“直到现在我们才知道鱼类有这种感知接触，或感知拖拽和剪切的能力，对贴附在快速移动物体上的印鱼来说，这会非常重要。”

By dissecting⁷ the fishes' suckers and looking at the tissue with electron microscopes and CT scans, they saw an unusual push-button-like structure, which they determined⁸ must be a type of mechanoreceptor, enabling a sense of touch.

通过仔细分析印鱼的吸盘并用电子显微镜和CT扫描仪观察这一组织，他们看到了不同寻常的按钮状结构，他们确定这肯定是一种能产生触感的机械性刺激感受器。

"And so we just started poring through the literature, trying to figure out what we were even looking at, and the only thing that has the same structure, a push-rod mechanoreceptor, are monotremes: platypus⁹ and echidnas."

“因此，我们开始研究文献，试图弄清楚我们观察到的到底是什么，而同样具有推杆状机械性刺激感受器结构的，是两种单孔上目动物：鸭嘴兽和针鼹。”

The details are in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

研究详情刊登在《英国皇家学会学报·开放科学》期刊上。

The study suggests that this sort of touch perception arose independently at least twice in the animal kingdom: in remoras and monotremes. And big picture?

这项研究表明，这种触觉感知在动物界至少独立产生过两次：在印鱼和单孔上虞动物身上。那接下来怎么做？

"I think the real story here is that we just need to look for different sensory¹⁰ capacities in organisms to a much larger extent. And that they are maybe mechanical receptors in all kinds of organism that we still have not found yet."

“我认为我们只需要在更大范围寻找生物的不同感受能力。可能所有生命体都有机械性感受器，而我们尚未发现。”

Because there are a lot of ways that life-forms have come up with to make a living.

因为生命形式想出了多种多样的谋生手段。

Thanks for listening for Scientific American's 60-second Science. I'm Christopher Intagliata.

谢谢大家收听科学美国人——60秒科学。我是克里斯托弗·因塔利亚塔。