Ed Yong
speaker
354 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2025
last heard 25 Sep
Ed Yong’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
spewing molecules into the world around us all the time, whether we like it or not.
And we do it especially from moist membranes more than other places.
So our breath...
Our groins, armpits, and these, and, you know, for us, as we've said, we don't go around sniffing each other in any of these areas.
Dogs do, because to them, smell provides many clues about the other, the individual that they're meeting, right?
Smell provides clues about identity, but also about things like age, health, diet.
Yeah, so this chemical is called dimethyl sulfide or DMS.
It smells kind of seaweed-y, a little oyster-y.
It's the smell of the sea.
We've talked about how there's been this long-standing myth that human sense of smell is terrible.
Equally, there has been this very long-standing myth that birds do not smell at all.
It's a lie.
Birds do smell.
Many of them smell very, very well.
And seabirds like albatrosses are some of them.
DMS is one of the things that they are paying attention to.
So when there's a ton of creole munching down on a ton of plankton under the surface of the water, when there's just a lot of life out there, that releases a ton of DMS out.
Yes, exactly like that.
Exactly like that.
And to a bird with the right nose, like an albatross, the scent of DMS reveals the parts of the ocean that are richest in life and so richest in food.
Showing 61–80 of 354 · page 4 of 18
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