Speaker 1: Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff Works, Hey, brain
Speaker 1: Stuff loring vogel bomb here. When two convicts pulled a
Speaker 1: shawshank redemption in and tunneled out of the Clinton County
Speaker 1: Correctional Facility and upstate New York, a two year old
Speaker 1: bloodhound named Jinny was hot on their trail. Working with
Speaker 1: James Pedolino from the Rensselaer County, New York Search and
Speaker 1: Rescue Team, Jinny and a number of other canines used
Speaker 1: their noses to scour the vast Adirondack region hoping to
Speaker 1: pick up the escape e scent. Pedolino said of bloodhounds
Speaker 1: in an interview with an Albany, New York television station,
Speaker 1: they never make a sound on the trail. All this
Speaker 1: loose skin helps hold the scent. Bloodhounds with their floppy
Speaker 1: skin and gangly ears are the quintessential tracking dogs, and
Speaker 1: there's good reason. While all types of dogs, including German
Speaker 1: Shepherds and Labrador retrievers can sniff out convicts, cadavers, and
Speaker 1: victims of disasters, the dogs with floppy ears seemed to
Speaker 1: be the best at what they do. For one thing,
Speaker 1: regardless of breed, dogs have amazing noses with more than
Speaker 1: two hundred and twenty million olfactory receptors. Experts say a
Speaker 1: dog's sense of smell is thousands of times more sensitive
Speaker 1: than a humans. In two thousand nine, researchers at Pennsylvania
Speaker 1: State University created a computer model of canines nose to
Speaker 1: better understand how dogs smell. They reported in the Journal
Speaker 1: of the Royal Society Interface that each nostril pulls in
Speaker 1: air about five times every second. The dog, it seems,
Speaker 1: knows which nostril is pulling in the scent, allowing them
Speaker 1: to turn right or left when tracking. Moreover, receptors continue
Speaker 1: to hold onto scent molecules even after the dog exhales.
Speaker 1: But that being said, dogs with floppy ears, such as bloodhounds, coonhounds,
Speaker 1: and bassett hounds, are exceedingly good trackers. That's because their
Speaker 1: long ears act as catchers miths, scooping up invisible scent
Speaker 1: particles on the trail and sweeping them towards the nose.
Speaker 1: The scent particles also get trapped in the folds of
Speaker 1: wrinkly skin on their faces, allowing the dog to carry
Speaker 1: reference samples as they hunt. Long ears also tamped down
Speaker 1: a dog's ability to hear far off sounds, forcing the
Speaker 1: dogs to rely more on their sense of smell. Today's
Speaker 1: episode was written by John Paritano and produced by Tyler Clang.
Speaker 1: For more on this and lots of other well honed topics,
Speaker 1: visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com