Because the star-nosed mole is functionally blind, the snout was long suspected to be used to detect electrical activity in prey animals,[6] though little, if any, empirical support has been found for this hypothesis.

A report in the journal Nature gives this animal the title of fastest-eating mammal, taking as little as 120 milliseconds (average: 227 ms) to identify and consume individual food items.

C. cristata is particularly adept at thermoregulation, maintaining a high body temperature in a wide range of external conditions relative to other Talpid moles.

He notes that some bats also have an auditory fovea for processing important echolocation frequencies, suggesting that "evolution has repeatedly come to the same solution for constructing a high-acuity sensory system: subdivide the sensory surface into a large, lower-resolution periphery for scanning a wide range of stimuli, and a small, high-resolution area that can be focused on objects of importance".

The star-nose is a highly specialized sensory-motor organ shaped by 22 fleshy finger-like appendages, or tendrils, that ring their nostrils and are in constant motion as the mole explores its environment.

[18] Regardless of the anatomical position of the star as a distal (protruding or extending) portion of the nose, this is neither an olfactory structure nor an extra hand.

They are controlled by tendons by a complex series of muscles that are attached to the skull in order to perform a role that seems to be purely mechanical.

[19] For this purpose, the star also contains a remarkably specialized epidermis covered entirely by 25,000 small raised domes or papillae of approximately 30–50 μm (0.0012–0.0020 in) in diameter.

However, instead of having more sensory organs, this fovea region uses a different approach where the skin's surface may be more sensitive to mechanoreceptic input; it has more innervation density.

This means that more than half of the brain is dedicated to processing sensory information acquired by this organ, even when the nose itself is only roughly 10% of the mole’s actual size.

[16][21] Recordings from active neurons in the somatosensory cortex show that most cells (97%) responded to light tactile stimulation with a mean latency of 11.6 milliseconds.

Besides a fairly large proportion of these neurons (41%) were inhibited by stimulation of proximate Eimer’s organs outside their excitatory receptive field.

Consequently, the ability of the star to rapidly determine location and identity of objects is enhanced by small receptive fields and its associated collateral inhibition system that constrains cortical neurons with short latency responses.

[16] In 1996, Vanderbilt PhD candidate Paul Marasco determined that the threshold by which the star-like structure senses the mechanical stimuli depends on which type of the Eimer’s organ was excited.

Conversely, the receptors that respond to compressive stimuli showed a narrow peak of maximal activity at 250–300 Hz with displacements from 10 to 28 μm.

Catania and colleagues demonstrated that the tactile organ of the star-nosed mole is preferentially innervated by putative light touch fibers.

[18] The use of the 11th appendage of the tactile fovea is surprisingly similar to the manner in which human eyes explore details of a visual scene.

[16] This star-like nose also enables the mole to smell underwater, something which was previously thought impossible in mammals, which requires the inspiration of air during olfaction to convey odorants to the olfactory epithelium.

[24] Although the star-like structure is not a chemoreceptor itself, it helps the star-nosed mole blow between 8 and 12 small air bubbles per second, each 0.06 to 0.1 mm in size, onto objects or scent trails.

[25] In 1993, Edwin Gould and colleagues proposed that the star-like proboscis had electroreceptors and that the mole was therefore able to sense the electrical field of its prey[26] prior to mechanical inspection by its appendages.

They suggested, therefore, that the nerve endings in the star’s tentacles are indeed electroreceptors and that the moles move them around constantly to sample the strength of the electromagnetic field at different locations as they search for prey.

[27] Although this theory lacks fossil evidence or supporting comparative data, nearly all extant moles have sheets of the Eimer’s organ making up the epidermis of their snout around the nares.

Also, recent studies of Catania and colleagues identified one North American species (Scapanus townsendii) with a set of proto-appendages extending caudally on the snout which exhibit a striking resemblance to the embryonic stages of the star-nosed mole,[27] although Scapanus townsendii has only eight subdivisions on its face, rather than the 22 appendages found on the star-nosed mole.

[27] The picture which emerges suggests that the star-nosed mole is an extreme in mammalian evolution, having perhaps the most sensitive mechano-sensory system to be found among mammals.

Wetlands have a dense population of small insects, so exploiting this resource requires a higher resolution sensory surface than that of other moles.

Star-nosed moles are the only species which live in the moist, muddy soil of wetlands where the less abrasive environment has allowed the delicate star-shaped structure to evolve.

[27] Due to the small invertebrate prey available in the wetlands, the star-nosed mole has developed handling times as short as 120 ms.

The dazzling speed with which it forages therefore counterbalances the low nutritional value of each individual piece of food and maximizes the time available for finding more.

As the Drosophila fly is to genetics, or the squid giant axon is to neurobiology,[16] the star-nosed mole may be the model organism for tactile transduction.