How does your dog smell? - November 27, 2008
The Great Beyond has sniffed out some great science news for dog lovers.
First up: New Scientist reports from an American Physical Society meeting in Texas that canines’ amazing sense of smell is all down to the slime on their noses. Apparently the mucus layer on wet dog noses absorbs some molecules faster than others. Now Brent Craven of Pennsylvania State University has used MRI images and computer models to show some molecules are detected at different points in the doggy airways.
“We’ve shown that the sorting out of the different odorants before they even get to the receptors is ... important,” says Craven.
All that super-smell-sense comes in handy when you’re a dog like Tucker, who works for researchers from the University of Washington. Tucker has the glamorous job of standing in the bows of a research boat and sniffing out whale excrement, it was reported last week.
The Seattle Times says:
When Tucker finds what researchers are looking for, he gets to play with his ball. So he is a highly motivated tracker — and in the summers of 2006 and 2008, he helped track down some of 130 samples of scat from orca whales in Puget Sound's J, K and L pods.
Hormone levels in the excrement show that Puget Sound’s resident orcas are nutritionally deprived, says Sam Wasser, director of the UW’s Center for Conservation Biology.
Finally, spare a thought for Matthew Marcum, whose dog blasted him with a shotgun. “He’s a good dog. It’s just one of those things. It’s an accident,” Marcum told The Oregonian.
