How to Smell like a Dog, with Ed Yong

What It Covers

Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Ed Yong explains how animals perceive the world through senses humans cannot access, from dogs' continuous smell streams to birds seeing ultraviolet colors to whales communicating across ocean basins.

Key Questions Answered

• •Dog olfaction mechanics: Dogs split inhaled air into two streams—one for breathing, one dedicated to smell—creating continuous scent perception unlike humans' strobing experience that blacks out with each exhale, enabling superior tracking abilities.
• •Human echolocation capability: Blind individuals like Daniel Kish navigate by making sharp tongue clicks and interpreting echoes to detect houses, cars, fences, and overhead branches, using the same distance-timing principles bats employ with ultrasonic calls.
• •Bird ultraviolet vision expansion: Birds possess four color-sensing cone cells versus humans' three, enabling perception of approximately 100 times more colors than humans see, revealing hidden patterns on flowers and feathers invisible to human eyes.
• •Sensory pollution disruption: Plastics in oceans emit dimethyl sulfide (DMS), the chemical seabirds like albatrosses use to locate food-rich waters, causing birds to ingest plastic debris by following false feeding signals in polluted areas.