The star is made of twenty-two fleshy appendages carrying more than 25,000 sensory structures called Eimer's organs. It is not used for smell or for grasping. The mole sweeps the star across the substrate, touching many points per second, and its brain devotes an unusually large area to processing what the star reports.
Measured handling times are extreme. Laboratory work by Kenneth Catania recorded mean times from touching prey to swallowing of well under 250 milliseconds, with the fastest recorded events near 120 milliseconds, close to the limit imposed by nerve conduction and reaction time. The strategy suits an animal that eats large numbers of very small invertebrates, where each item must be worth less time than it takes to reject it.
The mole also exhales air bubbles underwater and re-inhales them, which appears to let it sample odours while submerged. That interpretation is supported by experiment but is one of the less replicated results in the literature. The star is frequently described as an extra nose, which it is not: it is skin, and it reports touch.