To snot or not to snot, that is the question. Well, it might not be the question when your teacher or mom catches you picking your nose—then it seems to be no question at all that boogers are bad. But when come to your sense of smell, snot (or as scientists call it, mucus) may be the key to smelling a delicious meal, or smelling nothing at all. It turns out that the mucus in your nose traps the scent particles that enter your hooter and dissolves them. From here, they are shipped off to scent receptors, which tell the brain what kind of smell is wafting up the old schnozz!  Identifying scents help the brain decide if food is good or bad to eat, and it even helps us taste food once it enters the mouth. If you’ve ever had a tasteless meal when you had a bad cold and a stuffed up nose, you’ll know that the nose, not the tongue, holds the key to tasting food!

Of course pooches have more sensitive noses than we do. This is why we use them to sniff out drugs or to find missing people. In fact, many dogs have a sense of smell that is 100 times greater than that of humans. But which animal has the most sensitive nose in the animal kingdom? If it were determined by schnozz size, you’d have to guess an elephant seal. But size has little to do with it. The real answer to the animal with the most sensitive nose is, would you believe, the shark! Sharks use their sense of smell as their main way of telling what is going on around them, as opposed to dogs, which still rely heavily on sight. (Although sharks have very good eyesight too!)  A shark’s sense of smell is over a thousand times stronger than a human’s. Sharks only use their noses to smell. They don’t need to breathe through them. How come? Because sharks are fish, and like other fish, they breathe through their gills. How sensitive is a shark’s nose? Would you believe that it can smell one drop of blood in 100 litre of water! Yikes!