A barbel is a slender, fleshy projection on the head of a fish, usually set beside the nostrils or at the corner of the mouth, packed with touch receptors and taste buds. A shark with barbels can feel and taste the sea floor without putting its mouth on it.
Only a minority of sharks have them, and almost all of those are bottom-dwellers: nurse sharks, bamboo and epaulette sharks, wobbegongs, sawsharks, the zebra shark and one odd houndshark. Barbels are a mechanical and chemical sense, entirely separate from the electric sense of the ampullae of Lorenzini.
- What it sensesTouch and taste
- Usual positionBeside the nostrils
- Sharks that have themMostly bottom-dwellers
On this page
What a barbel is
A barbel is a soft, tapering outgrowth of skin and connective tissue that projects from the head of a fish. In sharks it is short — a centimetre or two in most species — and sits at the front edge of the nostril, hanging down towards the mouth. It has no bone or cartilage in it and no muscle to speak of, so a shark cannot wave one about the way a catfish can. It trails as the animal moves and brushes whatever the head passes over.
What makes it useful is what is packed inside. Barbels carry dense nerve endings that respond to pressure and contact, and taste buds that respond to dissolved chemicals. The two senses work together: the barbel touches something on the bottom and reports both that it is there and roughly what it is made of, before the shark commits to opening its mouth.
The same organ turns up all over the fish world, which is why the word is not a shark word at first. Catfish, carp, sturgeon, goatfish and cod all carry barbels, and in every case they belong to an animal that makes its living close to the bottom, often in water too murky for eyes to be much help.
Which sharks actually have them
Most sharks have none at all. The great white, the bull shark, the tiger shark, the hammerheads, the makos and the whole open-water crowd have a clean snout with nothing projecting from it. Barbels belong to a short list of families, and almost every one of them lives on or near the sea floor.
The carpet sharks account for most of the list. Nurse sharks have the pair everybody pictures: two stubby feelers beside the mouth, with a groove running from each nostril to the lip. Bamboo sharks and epaulette sharks have shorter versions, the zebra shark has small ones, and blind sharks and collared carpetsharks have them too. Wobbegongs add a fringe of branched skin lobes around the whole front of the head, which is a different structure and is not counted as a barbel.
Two outliers are worth naming. Sawsharks carry a pair of long barbels part-way along the blade of the rostrum and drag them across the sediment ahead of the saw. And the barbeled houndshark of West Africa is the only member of its family with them, which is how it got its name.
How a shark uses a pair of feelers
Watch a nurse shark work a reef at night and the barbels make sense immediately. The animal noses along the base of coral heads with its snout almost touching the rock, the two feelers dragging ahead of the mouth. When one of them contacts a lobster, a crab or a sleeping fish in a crevice, the shark stops, presses its small mouth against the opening and draws the prey out by suction. The barbel is what tells it where to stop.
The sawsharks use theirs differently. The barbels sit ahead of the teeth on the rostrum, so the shark sweeps the saw over soft sediment with the feelers making first contact; what they find, the saw then strikes. Bamboo and epaulette sharks work rubble and tide pools in the same probing way, at a smaller scale.
In every case the barbel closes a gap that the other senses leave. Sight is useless with a snout buried in sand, and hearing and smell give direction but not a precise spot. A feeler that both touches and tastes, held out in front of the jaws, is a short-range instrument for animals that hunt by rummaging.
Barbels are not the ampullae of Lorenzini
The two get confused constantly, including on pages that should know better, so it is worth being blunt about it. Barbels are projections that stick out from the head and sense touch and taste. The ampullae of Lorenzini are the opposite in every respect: pores that go inward, scattered in their hundreds across the snout, each opening into a jelly-filled canal that ends in a bulb of cells reading electric fields. One is a whisker, the other is a network of holes.
They also do not overlap in distribution. Every shark, ray, skate and chimaera has ampullae, including all the species with no barbels whatsoever. Only a handful of families have barbels. A great white has a densely packed electric sense and not a single feeler; a nurse shark has both, doing two different jobs.
For the neighbouring structures on the same head, see the spiracles behind the eye and the rest of the shark anatomy guide, or the shark terms glossary for the other words used across these pages.
Frequently asked questions
What are barbels on a shark?
They are short, fleshy feelers that hang from the head, usually beside the nostrils and just in front of the mouth. They contain touch receptors and taste buds, so a shark can feel and sample the sea floor before it opens its jaws. They have no bone inside and cannot be moved deliberately.
Which sharks have barbels?
Mainly the carpet sharks: nurse sharks, bamboo sharks, epaulette sharks, blind sharks, collared carpetsharks, wobbegongs and the zebra shark. Sawsharks carry a long pair on the rostrum, and the barbeled houndshark of West Africa is the only houndshark with them. Most other sharks have none at all.
Are barbels the same as the ampullae of Lorenzini?
No, and the two are often confused. Barbels project outward from the head and sense touch and taste. The ampullae of Lorenzini are inward-going pores filled with conductive jelly that detect weak electric fields. Every shark has ampullae, while only a small number of families have barbels.
What do sharks use barbels for?
For finding food they cannot see. A nurse shark drags its barbels along the base of a reef at night and stops when one contacts a crab or a resting fish in a crevice, then takes the prey by suction. Sawsharks sweep theirs over sediment ahead of the toothed rostrum.
Do great white sharks have barbels?
No. Great whites, bull sharks, tiger sharks, hammerheads and makos all have smooth snouts with nothing projecting from them. They hunt in open water where a short-range contact sense would add little, and they rely instead on smell, hearing, vision and their electroreceptors in the final approach.
References
A small team focused on researching sharks and making marine biology easy to understand. Every page is reviewed against current species records and the SharkSider attack database, and updated when new incidents or research appear.
Published December 2, 2014 · Last updated September 23, 2026 · Part of the Shark Anatomy section.
