Ok this is a really cool article!
Scientists in Florida studying the way lobsters sniff around for food on the sea floor say they have found a clue to developing technology that could help soldiers detect landmines and hidden explosives from a safer distance than current technology allows.
A lobster’s “nose” is actually a pair of hairy antennules that capture odor molecules that settle on the hairs and help the creatures locate an odor, researchers at the University of Florida said.
They are studying an olfactory neuron that emits bursts of electrical pulses, much like radar systems use pulses of radio energy to detect airplanes or thunderstorms.
…For a lobster, each bursting neuron responds to a whiff at a different frequency, according to Barry W. Ache, a distinguished professor of neuroscience and biology and director of the University of Florida’s Center for Smell and Taste.
Sensing the time between whiffs helps the lobster pinpoint the source, Ache said.
Computer modeling of the lobster olfactory cells helped the team understand how a lobster was extracting and processing information from the environment, Principe said.
Now to stay in the Marine Environment, they taught us in dive class to always be aware of our buddies, and when you hear a noise, like somebody rapping their knife against their tank, or shouting into their regulator, you’ll need to do a full 180 to find them. The reason is we hear direction because the sound hits one ear before the other. The time it takes between the two ears lets us know exactly where the sound comes from. This doesn’t just give you left vs. Right, but can also tell you where it is in 3D space. Now under water sound travels much faster because water is dense. This means that the sound travels too fast for your ears to distinguish where its coming from, and the sensation is the sound is coming from EVERYWHERE. The human ear just doesn’t sample sound fast enough to get direction sense. Now marine animals don’t have this issue because their biology samples sound faster than we do.
Now onto smell. Humans SUCK as smelling stuff. We can DETECT and identify scents, but using it to locate something is nearly impossible. One because our sense of smell sucks, but also because while we’re gathering data about the smell it fills our scent receptors and the smell appears to fade or vanish.
We’ve all done it, walk into a room, like the kitchen and you smell something bad. Is it the garbage disposal? Is it the trash? Is it something that got dropped on the floor? We don’t know, and it usually takes a few sweeps, often by leaving the room and letting your nose clear itself, then re-entering before you can locate what stinks.
Seems lobsters have bumped up the resolution of their smell, like how dolphins have bumped up the resolution of how fast their ears process sound.
VERY cool!
H/T C-90
I like how they talk about trying to use this to develop explosives sniffers for military use (presumeably in counterinsurgencies), overlooking the fact that we already have a similar technology (military bomb dogs), that has been found to have a simple, low tech, and low risk counter (hosing down large areas with a small amount of explosives dissolved in a plastic-safe solvent, using empty Windex bottles, turning entire blocks into false positives).