At Dogster, we love writing stories about dog’s noses, like this one by Caroline Coile, which has this marvelous line:
“The dog’s ability to detect acetic acid, a component of human skin secretions, is 100,000,000 times that of humans when tested in laboratory trials.”
Take a second with that: The dog’s nose can do something one hundred million times that of our nose. How can we even call our noses noses?
In any case, it’s time for a refresher course on the amazingness of the dog nose. This time, we turn to a TED-Ed Originals video, part of a series of lessons that “feature the words and ideas of educators brought to life by professional animators,” according to the website.
The new video, titled “How Do Dog’s ‘See’ With Their Noses,” animated by Província Studio, features its share of startling facts. Among them:
- Dogs smells separately, with each nostril — they smell in stereo.
- Smelling in stereo helps dog a dog know which direction a smell is coming from.
- Inside the nose, the air heads into two chambers: one for breathing, one for smelling. The one for smelling has 300 million olfactory receptor cells, compared to our five to six million.
- Dogs exhale through slits in the sides of their noses, which allows odors to build up in the nose, wheras humans exhale out odors with each sniff.
- Dogs have a vomeronasal organ, which detects hormones. Humans don’t have a vomeronasal organ, dammit.
- This line: “Where we see and hear something in a single moment, a dog smells an entire story, from start to finish.”
Watch the video:
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