Dog noses are pretty spectacular. Their sense of smell is between ten thousand and a hundred thousand times better than ours. This means they can detect pretty much anything we train them to, including drugs, endangered animal poo and cancer. If that wasn’t enough, we now think they can even ‘smell’ heat.
Scientists gave dogs a choice of two completely identical items, one at 19 degrees Celsius (room temperature) and one at 31 degrees Celsius (the body temperature of small mammals). The dogs were trained to ‘hunt’ for the warm option from a couple of metres away. All the dogs got it right most of the time.
The researchers think that this heat-sensing ability comes from the skin on the tip of a dog’s nose. Because it’s cold and wet, it can detect heat from a distance, which is useful for hunting. This makes dogs one of the only animals we know with this ability, along with some insects, snakes and vampire bats.
This article was published in Issue 40 of Double Helix magazine (https://www.csiro.au/en/Education/Double-Helix). Copyright for this article is held by CSIRO.
Lachlan Writes Science 