How a dog's nose works Health

Malka · Feb 20, 2015

The following is from an article I just read which I found quite interesting.

As your dog catches the first hints of fresh air, her nose’s moist, spongy outside helps capture any scents the breeze carries. The ability to smell separately with each nostril, smelling in stereo, helps to determine the direction of the smell’s source so that within the first few moments of sniffing, the dog starts to become aware of not just what kind of things are out there but also where they’re located.

As air enters the nose, a small fold of tissue divides it into two separate flows, one for breathing and one just for smelling. This second airflow enters a region filled with highly specialized olfactory receptor cells, several hundred millions (300,000,000) of them, compared to our five million. And unlike our clumsy way of breathing in and out through the same passage, dogs exhale through slits at the side of their nose, creating swirls of air that help draw in new odor molecules and allow odor concentration to build up over multiple sniffs.

But all that impressive nasal architecture wouldn’t be much help without something to process the loads of information the nose scoops up. And it turns out that the olfactory system dedicated to processing smells takes up many times more relative brain area in dogs than in humans. All of this allows dogs to distinguish and remember a staggering variety of specific scents at concentrations up to 100 million times less than what our noses can detect. If you can smell a spritz of perfume in a small room, a dog would have no trouble smelling it in an enclosed stadium and distinguishing its ingredients, to boot.
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http://www.petmd.com/blogs/thedaily...mail&utm_content=022015blog&utm_campaign=Blog

How a dog's nose works Health

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How a dog's nose works

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