OOOooh that smell! Can’t you smell that smell!?
Hello everyone! Today I want to tell you about how I smell my world! You see fish live in water (duh!), which means we constantly smell all of the dissolved odorants that are in the water around us while we swim around. In fact, we use smell for almost everything! I use it for finding food, avoiding becoming food (predator avoidance), navigating, and even finding mates or avoiding other males that may want to fight. Fishes have a sensitive “nose” comprised of an olfactory epithelium full of olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs) that detect all kinds of different smells. Each type of neuron detects a certain “type” of smell. For example, ones called ‘crypt neurons’ detect pheromones (which help me find my special friend Toni! ;)). Each of these different types of ORNs sends signals to a specific region in my olfactory bulb at the very front of my brain. You see, my olfactory bulb is a sorting center for all of these different kinds of smells. From there, the signals go on to other parts of