The Sense of Smell - Cats heavily rely on it !

Hello lovely Hiveans !

During the last months I was really super busy in writing up my PhD thesis and had really little time to focus on blogging here in Hive .. and the little time I had left I was mostly concerned with restructuring the Amazing Nature community. I am sorry that my account grew so silent during this times ^^ .. But now, that I was finally able to submit it, I want to take the chance to publish another post. This time it is about cat senses 😻

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I actually discovered an really astonishing interplay between my two cats Nami and Jeremy the last year and was able to document it in a picture series that I would like to present to you. Nami was in the hospital for a day and received an operation. As a result she did not smell as usual. The following scene here shows are highly cats are trusting all their six senses and not only the visual sense that that we humans are probably using as our primary sense for nearly everything. I hope you enjoy it and get an impression of how sensible animals are when it comes to smelling, especially cats ^^ .. This said, here is my little story for you. I hope you enjoy it 😉


Who are you!

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After approaching Nami, Jeremy feels a strange presence. "This smell .." he thinks, "it is a strange smell. Is it really Nami?" Her smell was very different indeed as she was freshly out of the hospital and it clearly confuses him. "Hey there, who the paw are you? You look like Nami, but you do not smell like her!"

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But Nami is not irritated by his behavior. Instead she does not move an inch, stays as calm as possible and deeply looks him in his eyes. "Its me pal, can't you see it? .. Just look at me." This somehow calms him down indeed and he starts to inspect her very closely again. "Hmm, she looks normal, she looks as always ..."

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".. but, .. but something does not fit here. Something is strange here! Is it really possible that this could be my Nami?" Skepticism is rising in his mind. Also this cat looks like her the smell is different. A struggle begins weather to trust his eyes or his nose. A struggle between all his senses which all suggest something different.

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Suddenly it clicks in his head. "This cat is an imposter!" All his senses are highly alarmed now. "It is simply impossible that you are Nami" he grunts at her. "I can clearly smell it! You are a witch! Go away!" he hisses. But Nami still sits there, calmly, starring at him, deeply believing that by seeing her from just an inch away he simply has to recognize her.

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But Jeremy is not an easy one to get tricked. He feels the urge to show this imposter that she is not welcome her and prepares his claws. "I saw through your cheap magic!" he hisses and screams while he aims to hit her nose. "Miau off from here, you are not welcome!"


Cat Senses

There are 6 conventional senses that we are able to use, which are vision, hearing, vestibular, touch, taste and smell. Humans are mainly focused on their vision, but cats are using all of their senses to a high degree. Here is a little summary of them ^^

VISION: Cats usually have an approximately range of sight of about 20 m and thus are nearsighted. But as evolution intended to create our little fellows to be actual predator back in the days and no large-range observers this is sufficient enough for them. But contrary to us they are able to see in in the dark, which is a pretty cool feature, hehe.

HEARING: Their hearing range is very close to what we humans are capable of, also they can hear higher pitched sounds a little better than we do.

SMELL: As you might have already guesses, this is the sense that really stands out. Compared to our 5 million odor-sensitive cells cats can possess nearly 200 million in their noses! Thus their comparable hearing and less efficient visual sight is just there for actually bringing down their prey, while their smell is capable to detect their prey from tremendous distances. For me it is not unusual to see that cats therefore trust their smell sense far more than any other one 🙀 .. By the way, did you ever though abut why cats are rubbing against some people? If your cat rubs at you then you should feel highly honored, hehe ^^

Touch: Cats have around twenty-four whiskers. They are even capable of receiving as much neural information with these whiskers as they would get with their visual sense in this very close up region. Scientist actually once figured out that they can create a three-dimensional map of their close surrounding with these too ! If I look at my beard right now I can not say that it is capable for such a little natural wonders. I would not even notice bread crumbs in it, hahaha .. Cats are really amazing predators and posses awesome features ^^

VESTIBULAR: The vestibular sense, the ability to maintain balance and body posture, of cats is simply astonishing. I assume that everyone out there could not other than to agree on this. It actually is so famous that there are many phrases and sayings about it. They simply jump like little legends, always land on their feet and truly mastered this sense .. but .. if you ever watched cats in the interweb you might have also seen tons of funny examples to prove that this sometimes can go really wrong 😹

TASTE: When it comes to taste it is really impressive that cats posses kind of inactive genes that allow them to ignore various tastes completely. Thus cats have a huge evolutionary advantage over other predators as it allows them to prey on a greater variety within their diet. My cats for example love to eat plants. Nevertheless, while I find it quite impressive it is also very annoying as they always eat up all the plants here 😭


Thank you !

Thank you very much for reading my post. I really love my little fur-balls and could not withstand to write up a story around the picture sequence that I was so lucky to record that day. Cats are just such beautiful, gorgeous and cuddly little fellows and I could not think of a life without them. Maybe you guessed it already .. I am a cat person ^^



All pictures were taken by myself, ©@adalger, with a Huawei P30 Mobile Phone. For information gathering I used several articles on Wikipedia


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If you want to know more about me, just look up my Introduceyourself post or follow my blog ^^

Learn more about @adalger here !


Best wishes,
Adalger

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