Yoghurt always reminds me how fucking good cat noses are. As soon as I open a yoghurt cup, one of my cats pops out from nowhere, with the feline equivalent of this face, almost as if saying “is this yoghurt? I smell yoghurt! I want! Gib! Gib!” through her “rrrown-nyooown?”.
The lungs receive one stream of air that filters and slowly spreads above the roof of the mouth. The other stream carries odors quickly through a central passage to the olfactory region at the back of the nasal cavity.
That makes sense - cleaning and humidifying the air has its pros (better quality for breathing) but also its cons (you’re filtering out a lot of potential smells). Splitting the stream this way gives you the best of both worlds.
The “parallel channels” likely decrease local pressure, so the airflow gets slower. It shouldn’t be hard to implement the same concept in a gas chrom.
Zhao said, “The cat nose probably has a similar complexity level as the dog’s, and it’s more complex than a rodent’s – and it begs the question – why was the nose evolved to be so complex?”
If I had to take a guess, the selective pressure towards better noses in carnivores comes from their specialised diet. If you’re a rodent or a human you can fill your belly with a lot of diversified junk, but if you’re carnivore you’ll probably need a damn good way to detect potential prey - because otherwise you’ll die of hunger. And you need to do this in a silent and invisible way, not by popping your head out of the bush to look at the prey.
A cat’s night vision is top-notch, better than most other animals. Due to their incredible smelling ability, people often compare cat noses to high-tech chromatographs.
Small tidbit of trivia: your typical human has better colour sight (3 primary colours; cats likely have 2) and identification of objects from afar than your typical cat. The later can be even tested at home with a toy on a string - get slowly closer to your cat, and check when it reacts to the toy.
Interesting topic, cancerous website. Ad blocker is a must.
My idiot brain read ‘nasal’ as ‘anal’ and went like 'Hmm, so cats can smell with their butts. TIL." Stupid, stupid brain.
