| Title | New Sense Discovered in Dog Noses: The Ability to Detect Heat | |
| Date | Sunday March 01 2020, @03:15PM | |
| Author | Fnord666 | |
| Topic | ||
| from the smells-pretty-warm dept. | ||
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Dogs’ noses just got a bit more amazing. Not only are they up to 100 million times more sensitive than ours, they can sense weak thermal radiation—the body heat of mammalian prey, a new study reveals. The find helps explain how canines with impaired sight, hearing, or smell can still hunt successfully.
“It’s a fascinating discovery,” says Marc Bekoff, an ethologist, expert on canine sniffing, and professor emeritus at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who was not involved in the study. “[It] provides yet another window into the sensory worlds of dogs’ highly evolved cold noses.”
The ability to sense weak, radiating heat is known in only a handful of animals: black fire beetles, certain snakes, and one species of mammal, the common vampire bat, all of which use it to hunt prey.
Most mammals have naked, smooth skin on the tips of their noses around the nostrils, an area called the rhinarium. But dogs’ rhinaria are moist, colder than the ambient temperature, and richly endowed with nerves—all of which suggests an ability to detect not just smell, but heat.
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printed from SoylentNews, New Sense Discovered in Dog Noses: The Ability to Detect Heat on 2023-07-07 04:16:06