(This is helpful for Year13 Biology – Animal Behaviour)
- Domestic dogs can determine the age, gender, sexual activity, and exact identity of another dog simply by sniffing the scent marks it leaves behind.
- Rats can smell a cat. The mere whiff of cat odour causes a rat’s blood pressure to rise dramatically, even if it has never encountered a cat before in its life.
- Birds recognize each other by smell just as mammals do.
- Nesting birds change the way they smell so that predators cannot sniff them out. Usually ground-nesting birds and ducks coat their feathers using a substance known as a preen wax, which repels water and inhibits the growth of feather-degrading bacteria.
- Rats smell in stereo. With just one sniff, the rodents can workout the direction a smell is coming from. That is because the waft of an odour reaches each nostril 50milliseconds apart, a tiny but significant different that allows the rat to workout from and where the smell is emanating. When one nostril is blocked, a rat’s ability to sniff out the direction of a smell is greatly reduced.
- Wasps and bees have such good noses that they are being used to quality-check the freshness of supermarket food. They are also being trained to sniff out the chemical ingredients of bombs or the odours produced by people with certain diseases.
From ‘Moths that drink elephants tears – And other zoological curiosities” by Matt Walker. Matt Walker is a writer and senior editor with New Scientist, the world’s leading weekly science and technology magazine.
There are lots of interesting books at libraries. Make sure you read heaps and build answers to your questions! 