Why You Smell What You Smell: The Science of Scents, Skunks & Memory

Subscribe and let your nose lead the way. This episode stinks—in the best way possible.

In this surprisingly deep dive into all things scent, Katy Reiss and Laura Fawks Lapole explore how your sense of smell works, why it’s wildly underappreciated, and what makes certain smells feel amazing (or like a chemical attack).

🧠 How does smell connect to memory and emotion?
 🦨 What makes skunk spray so powerful—and impossible to wash off?
 🌺 Why do corpse flowers pretend to be rotting meat?
 🍪 And why can one person love the smell of cookies while someone else smells… socks?

From pregnancy nose powers to extinct olfactory genes, this episode blends biology, psychology, and botany into a surprisingly aromatic mix of weird science and fun facts.

🎧 This is Season 12, Episode 2 of Wildly Curious—and your nostrils will never forget it.

Transcript

katy: [00:00:00] righty. Well,

In today's episode, we're gonna be talking about things that stink

laura: or smell great.

katy: or smell great. Yeah. Smells in general. Good smells, bad smells, and how they play an incredibly important role in our lives, even though it may be. Sometimes, well oftentimes underappreciated because I feel like sometimes a good smell is underappreciated tooth.

You don't really take time to appreciate

laura: because I definitely think, if you're like playing a would you rather game, what would be the scents that most people would be like, I could live without it smell, but so it's underappreciated for how important it is.

katy: Yeah. My aunt can't smell

laura: My mom can't smell very good at all. She always asks me to smell stuff if

katy: Yeah, I can't remember what happened. I, I can't remember if it was like she got sick when she was a kid and then just could never smell again. But, it's like my aunt has no sense of smell whatsoever, so it's to the point where she has to like picking out perfumes or whatever, like she has to have somebody to go with her 'cause she has zero.

Zero sense of smell.

laura: my mom has one. It's just not very good, and she's always been like, she said, she's just born that way, but. And like really [00:01:00] little research has been done on smell. From like doing this episode, you're like, wow, we do not know a lot about this since.

katy: Okay. I'm glad it wasn't just me 'cause I was going through it and I was trying to find, so we're gonna, Laura and I are gonna divide this episode up. Laura's gonna talk about good smells. I'm gonna be talking about the quote unquote bad smells. But yeah, I'm glad I wasn't the only one that I was like, man, this is, there's stuff out there, but nothing like Norm.

laura: as, as

katy: Yes, yes,

laura: you know what I mean? Like, I think one, it's because it's underappreciated. It's also under researched. But thankfully, un thankfully, um, COVID has brought an entirely new thing. There's so much more research on smell now because of C'S impact on everything.

katy: yeah. No, that's true.

laura: so at least like we are starting to uncover more, but it is complicated sense. So on that note, I'm gonna explain, how does your sense of smell work in its most basic form? Yes, like slightly deeper, but not like going into neurons and stuff.

katy: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

laura: So smell tiny, [00:02:00] invisible molecules and chemicals that float through the air from all sorts of sources.

Could be food or animals, other people, flowers, everything. Everything releases these molecules and chemicals. And when we sniff, many of those particles go up into our noses, depending on how many particles go in each nostril. We can sometimes detect the direction of smell, but that's not very easy for humans.

Like we're not very good at being like, it's over there.

katy: I think I've said that before on the episode, when I was pregnant, I swear to

laura: everybody turns into a bloodhound a little

katy: oh my goodness. Laura and I were working at the zoo together when I was pregnant, and there could have been a food truck on the opposite side of the zoo.

And as soon as we stepped outside the education boat, I was like, french fries, bacon, cheese,

laura: Yeah. Yeah.

katy: it was like so particular it

laura: Or like bad smells are so much worse.

katy: Yeah. So yeah, because again, we had that bird that was quarantining in our office and to this day, I cannot take the smell of of bird Dan, like of bird dander because it was so [00:03:00] overwhelming because my nose was just heightened aware.

Yeah.

laura: yeah. I definitely was able to smell like the fridge opening in another room. Because of not good smells necessarily either. Just you're like, oh, I didn't even know the fridge smelled like that.

katy: Yeah.

laura: So chewing and drinking can also send molecules up the back of your throat to the back of your nose, which.

I, I guess I knew, but not really how it worked, that when you're chewing, it's not just your taste buds of course your smell is impacting your sense of taste. I did know that. But how it works is that it floats up there and the receptors at the back of your nose are detecting

katy: Which makes sense. 'cause if you have a head cold and your head is all stepped up, that's why you can't taste as well because

laura: don't even bother trying to enjoy those foods.

katy: Yeah. Right.

laura: So those molecules then attach to special olfactory sensory neurons in our noses. And we've talked about neurons before. There are little messenger cells, so in your nose, and then they send messages like beep, beep, beep, beep to the olfactory bulbs in our brains.

Millions of these cells [00:04:00] with between 400, with around 400 varieties of these cells that uptake specific molecules. So you have millions of little sensory neurons in that nose. And there's 400 different types of them. So depending on which ones light up, because they're picking up, they're like coded for spec for their own sorts of molecules, depending on how they light up, sends a certain type of signal.

katy: So wait, how many, how many receptors did you say we had?

laura: but 400 varieties

katy: Okay. How many does that compare? Did you like compare that to a dog or something

laura: No, but I, it's

katy: I mean, I know it's

laura: it's not. It's not as much. We actually have more than people think, they're not all utilized either, which I'll get into. So messages from the, so it goes to the olfactory bulb, messages from this bulb. These bulbs are then sent to other areas of the brain, including ones that store memories, giving us the experience of smell.

Okay, so [00:05:00] because it truly is an experience, because it's different in context and all that stuff, so this makes smell, memory, and emotion intermingle and are very unique to this sense. , In no other sense. Of course, if you see something, you remember something, but your brain parts for your emotions don't light up quite the

katy: Yes, so I talk. Yeah, so I talked about a little bit about that, so I might as well talk about that now. So your sense of smell is the only s sense that we use that directly goes, was it to your prefrontal cortex?

laura: Or like it's somewhere right in there. Yeah. Like it's a direct wiring where other parts have to be there's an

katy: zigzag through. Yeah. It's a bigger processing of your brain to comprehend like eyesight, or if you hear something, it's like several different parts of your brain working together to process it. Which then gives you your output of, Hey, this is what it is. Whereas smell is right up and so that's why they say , tri trigger warning here, but whenever police are, talking to witnesses and stuff, especially ones that [00:06:00] have gone through, have been a victim of a crime, a lot of times they do ask about smell because eyewitness accounts are notoriously inaccurate, but smell.

So if you're like, Hey, you know, I, I didn't know where I was when it happened. Well, you know, what did you see? What did you hear? What did you smell? Because smell is a very strong

laura: it's very visceral.

katy: Yeah. And that's because of that direct pathway, part of your brain. I.

laura: totally. And smell is not as precise in humans as sight and hearing for example, we can identify different instruments. If a song is being played, your brain is there is the guitar, there's the violin, there's the horn. We can pick out those pieces. But we usually cannot smell the individual parts that make up the mixture of a smell because there

katy: guess I never thought of it that way. Yeah,

laura: me

katy: I never thought of it that way. Yeah.

laura: So we can smell a chocolate chip cookie, but it is almost impossible for us to identify all the smells of the different ingredients within that cookie. So it says, I found some [00:07:00] really cool facts. Your morning cup of coffee can contain more than 800 different types of odor molecules. Okay?

So your brain to come up with the smell of coffee, it's 800 different things going in your nose. That's , that's making that smell a rotting banana, 20 molecules. No matter what it is, it's still a variety. There's not just one molecule ever going in your nose that's that smell. That's why there are these different varieties of neurons that will light up in different combinations.

However, scientists believe that we can identify over a trillion different odors. So although our sense of smell might not be as precise as in animals, we can identify about as many smells as an animal. We're just not good at knowing where they're from.

katy: yeah, we, we can smell it. We can't tell where it's coming from or anything, but we, we can,

laura: I mean, a trillion is crazy to think about, , like smell is so nuanced. It's never almost the same experience [00:08:00] twice and

katy: so I guess

laura: maybe it could be like rotting banana or very rotten banana, you know what I

katy: what I was gonna say. I guess that's like the biggest difference then between us and animals is animals can pinpoint it and it's just stronger, like a stronger smell for them. Yeah.

laura: And interesting enough, some people also just can't smell certain scents because of genetic factors. , A study found that we can expect, so like you and me, we have a 30% variation in our receptors. That goes for anybody sitting next to you. They have 30 different percent different stuff going on in their noses than you do, which is why you are never going to smell the same smell as a person.

So these receptors are constantly being damaged too in your nose and then regenerating, but they don't always regenerate the same. So also what you smelled before might not be the same thing that you smell later. Depending on what's happening with those neurons. Scientists also think that we might have up to 600 more [00:09:00] genes that could code for receptors that we just don't use anymore.

And that maybe we did when we were more more primitive human

katy: Primitive. That's what I was gonna say. Yeah,

laura: more in tune with nature. When we needed to know when smell was more important for survival. It

katy: what I was gonna say. Yeah. Yes it was. It was way more important. Whereas now, if you think about it, smell is the least one of the least important survival things. For us. Like it's just

laura: Important but not necessarily life or death in most careers , or jobs.

katy: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's more of an indicator, but it's not gonna save your life kind of thing. A smell of a chemical that you know, oh, hey, like a gas leak. Oh, hey, something smells weird. But it's ultimately you're hearing your, you know what I mean? It's other senses that help you get away from the danger where a smell is almost the, the warning

laura: Well, right, and we've lived for so long with identified foods that were not really.

katy: Yeah,

laura: worried about that. Identifying like [00:10:00] poison, not poison

katy: yeah.

laura: It also says that women are more sensitive to smell, especially body odor,

katy: I'm

laura: not surprised. You're like,

katy: Yeah.

laura: good for men? I'm glad because then they can't smell.

But women are like, absolutely not

katy: it is either an absolutely yes or an absolutely no smell. There is no, no InBetween.

laura: , And mental health can increase or decrease smell sensitivity. And I had that happen once. I don't know if it was Lyme or just like a mental breakdown, but I, when I was, I was feeling so anxious that my sense of smell got better. Which also made my, which made me nauseous more often because of the sense of smell.

It was so, it was so bizarre.

So we just talked about how smell works, but why do things smell good to certain people and bad to certain people? So, Katy and I kind of divided this up in that I kind of covered the science of good smells and Katy did the science of bad smells. So we begin connecting smells to memories at a super young age.

, And again, like [00:11:00] I said before, it's incredibly individualized because each person experiences selt differently. And a lot is based on context. You'll probably see between Katy and I, there are certain smells that could go either way, depending on context. But it does seem, so I was reading a lot of interesting research on this because some people have a theory that smell is cultural.

But they

katy: Oh, for

laura: they kind of debunked some of that a little bit. But is there universally liked smells? So no matter the person. How they described it all over the world. People do like certain smells and there are the three most liked smells. So I'll just go over the first one or do you have a guess?

What do you think is the most liked smell on planet Earth?

katy: Vanilla.

laura: Yes. Vanilla is the, is the

katy: I, I, 'cause I picked, yes. 'cause I picked one that was like, okay, it's good. It's not strong 'cause I can't, because I have asthma and stuff and so I cannot walk into

laura: bath and body dude is

katy: Yes. Bath and body. Yeah. It's too, or like a Yankee candle store or something. , It's just [00:12:00] too,

laura: many smells at once.

katy: Yeah.

laura: That's I feel the same way. I can't take, I can take one. I can take one strong smell. I just don't like the combination of everything. It's like too much sensory stuff. But yes, so vanilla, which the molecule that makes that smell that our brain really likes is vanilla.

, And it's really interesting because I, last year, or no, earlier this year, I did a chocolate program at work and they talked about how one of the ingredients that is often added to chocolate is vanilla. And companies use different amounts of vanilla and types in order to create a signature flavor for their chocolate that is emotional.

So humans are so in love with vanilla no matter where they are, and you're, it's emotionally tied to certain smells that you're like, that's my chocolate because of the vanilla that's in it.

katy: Yeah, I can see that because so I'm, or again, originally from Pittsburgh and there's a chocolate company there, Sarris candies, so of course you have the other side of the state, Hershey.

[00:13:00] Which is such a, a, again, not a knock on Hershey, it's not horrible, but it's such a distinct,

laura: it's certainly not small batch chocolate. Yeah.

katy: Correct. Yeah. It's such a, it's such a huge difference. Now I'm gonna have to be like, what's your vanilla

laura: yeah. What's your signature? Vanilla like, how do you trick us into lugging it so much? But yeah, vanilla.

katy: Interesting. All righty. Well. Like we said, I'm gonna focus then on bad smells.

So bad smells are bad for a reason. All right. We hinted, Laura and I were talking about this in the intro about, when the Lord was breaking down how smells work. But let's think of like rotten eggs, sweaty gym socks. Like Laura said, the weird thing in the back of your fridge. Bad smells do exist for a reason, and like I said earlier, they are often warning signs.

It's a warning of stay away for the [00:14:00] most part. All right, so that's just like a little bit of an

laura: Yeah. 'cause it does, it did say of course there are outliers in both liked and disliked. There are some, it doesn't make sense that you like them, but you do.

katy: yes. The two that I'm gonna talk about, I'm gonna talk about one right now. Is a fairly, for humans anyway, it's a universally hated smell and it's the smell of the corpse flower. Alright? So it's one of the, like the legendary, stinkiest plant I think of the natural world. It's called the titan RI am or the amor of PHUs titanium. This beauty or beast, depending on how you look at it, is a native of the rainforest of Western Sumatra and Indonesia. It grows underground from a massive tuber called a corn, and then shoots up either a single enormous leaf, which is like up to 15 feet tall. If you guys have never seen what a corpse flower looks like it's a massive Yeah, it is.

It is. It's [00:15:00] pretty cool. But yeah, it's crazy. But it's one huge, typically like one enormous leaf. . Then an in fluorescence, which is not a single flower, which towers more than eight feet tall, wrapped in a deep like burgundy sheath. It's rare blooming once to only ever three to seven years, sometimes even longer, and each bloom only lasts from about 24 to 36 hours.

laura: Yeah, they always announce it. If the National Arboretum has it bloom, they're like, hurry up, corpses, flower.

katy: up. Yeah, it's gonna be here and it's gonna be gone. And so the corpse flower itself was first discovered by Western science. 'cause I said it's like from Indonesia and stuff, but we d the Western science discovered it in 1879 by an Italian botanist or Don Ano Bakari who just encountered it in this ma

laura: discovered it, right?

katy: Right. Yeah.

laura: named it, cataloged it. Yeah.

katy: Yeah. All that stuff. But honestly, like imagine being that guy. 'cause I'm gonna describe

laura: has nobody else noticed this [00:16:00] plant? And everyone's yeah, but we just never worked. Like,

katy: yeah, yeah. Right. And then trying to talk to the people that are already there. Like what? And stumbling upon it because clearly, it's called a corpse flower for a reason.

I'll get into the smell here in a second, but , it smells like a dead rot, like rotting something. And so it's but that's coming from a plant like you would think an elephant died nearby. You know what I mean? Of how powerful that smell can be. All right, so let's talk about what the flower actually does and how it creates the smell, and then we'll go into the kind of the why.

So right before it blooms, the s Spex, the tall yellow stock thing in the center of the flower actually heats itself up and not like a little bit warm. It can go upwards of 20 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the surrounding air, which, yeah, which is crazy considering they're mostly in greenhouses in Indonesia, hot, moist rainforest, and it's already 20 degrees hotter than that.

So this process is called thermogenesis, and it's definitely rare in the plant world, but the corpse flower uses it [00:17:00] strategically. The heat helps vaporize all the stink chemicals it's producing so they can travel further and hit surrounding air like a chemical punched to the face essentially.

And it is certainly a punch to the face. So researchers analyzing the scent found a full death mimicking buffet molecules, which. Contribute. A variety of these things contribute to the stink itself. So dimethyl, tris, sulfite, trisulphide, sorry, is the signature smell of rotting meat and cabbage. All right.

Reine and cadaver, these are the exact same compounds

laura: could immediately know what those smell like.

katy: Right. So anything that's released when actual animal tissue is decaying trimm, methylene is the scent of rot fish, or is, you know, these are all the main chemicals that contribute to the smell, like Laura said, like they're made up of a variety of things.

Iso valeric acid, which is also found in sweaty socks.

laura: Oh yeah. [00:18:00] Sweaty socks. I definitely came across as being like a universally disliked smell.

katy: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, for sure. And just to kind of throw everything off, they, the flower has a hint of benzo alcohol, which smells a little bit floral, but not in a good way. Something more of something died in old grandma's rose garden kind of floral. So it's is that a flower? But it's horribly smelling.

So. That SSP combo is no accident. It's built from a cascade of metabolic pathways that ramp up during the bloom. Dartmouth RA researchers, even sequence the flowers, RNA, during the bloom, and found that genes tied to alternative oxidase activity. How it makes the heat and sulfur metabolism just go wild during the phase.

So it's it's almost like a whole other process happens during this bloom that really isn't seen in a whole lot of other plants, so basically the plant is biochemically designed to rot without actually rotting. [00:19:00] Yeah.

laura: it's kind of like, it's our version. It's, look, America's ver, or America's version is skunk cabbage. It's like the same, it's same family of plant. It's just not as

katy: yes. Yeah. Yeah. Not as extreme. So why does the corpse flower smell like death? Well, after all the heat, the vaporize rot, gas, the theatrical bloom, everything, the question always comes down to then why? Why would a plant go to such extreme lengths to smell like a dead dying animal

laura: could just smell good.

katy: Yeah. Right. Well, because the rainforest, that's how you get attention. The corpse flower isn't trying to attract bees or butterflies. It wants like the gross animals. It wants the carrying beetles, the flesh flies. And other insects that love rotting meat. So these insects normally spend their time laying eggs and dead animals or feeding onto Kang tissue, but the corpse flour tricks them into thinking that that flour is the prime spot that it needs to go to.

So the flies then, or whatever, be [00:20:00] beetles, everything they land on it, crawl all over the s spex and inside the space picking up the pollen in the process. Some even lay their eggs in there thinking oh, this is a rotting animal. The eggs die off. Plant doesn't care. 'cause it's just there to carry out.

Hey, take the pollen on. So not only that, the smell plays a, you know, a, a role in it, but the deep burgundy color or the space that mimics Yep. The raw flesh, the texture of the flour. Meaty veiny,

laura: Ew. Meaty.

katy: Yeah. Um, but then also don't forget, like I said, it produces heat. So it's the body warm temperature.

Yep. Adds that F final. Hey, this is probably a dead animal. It's a fresh corpse. You wanna come lay your eggs in, but all they're really looking for is, Hey, come pick up some pollen. And then go away. So it's definitely nature's grossest pollination strategy, but at the same time it's it's very [00:21:00] smart.

It's a very smart thing. So again, it's

laura: not as fierce. Like if you're not trying to smell good like every other flower, then.

katy: Yep. Because think about in the rainforest, how many things flowers, there's so many variety of species that you're competing against. This flower is let's go this way and kind of change things up a

laura: Yeah. Yeah. That's

katy: that's the corpse flour.

Yeah,

laura: Well, and I just think too, so with mine, good smells, they're only, they're good to only certain people. It doesn't have to do with survival necessarily, right? Like good is just, oh, it might taste good or it reminds me of something nice. Bad smells is like survival, right? It's the bad stuff that'll kill you.

The good stuff is just like cool. So it's less straightforward as far as what people do because it is, so there was one example that they

katy: But how much have, how much, because I know they've done a ton of research and into attraction and smell and ha, but has there been any correlation then [00:22:00] where they've taken it a step farther to see reproductive successful? You know what I mean?

laura: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I guess that's probably a long-term study, but one, one thing that, that I found is that companies that sell scented products, they do it to make money. So there is a whole research on marketing, right? Like people want things that smell good. So they make products that a large amount of people like, so they're also doing research on what is, what do people like a lot.

And so they have 5 cent categories, not 5 cent, not the most popular cent, but categories of cent. Number one is woodsy scents. So things that smell like pine,, like

katy: Yes.

laura: in the woods. Cedar, the man scents. Yeah.

katy: the man sense,

laura: Number two is floral, the female scents, you

katy: the female sense. Yeah.

laura: smell good. Number three is fruity.

, So like

katy: Which is what I prefer. Yeah. I prefer the, the fruit, because again, the florals for me, a lot of 'em are it's just, it's too,

laura: It totally depends. Floral's great for me. I love sweet pea scented

katy: Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

laura: but [00:23:00] not a funeral parlor scent. Like, like, like there's just a difference,

katy: Pop. Yeah. It's like, yeah.

laura: Fourth most popular is spicy, so like a spiced scent with cinnamon or something like that. And then number five is food.

Anything that has to do with food makes people remember food and they want it like, so sugar cookie and you know, honey and things like that. . And you know, I had said it's very context based. So like for example, one, the molecules that make up the scent of Parmesan cheese, if you just bottle that scent, which they actually have

katy: outta everything he could have picked

laura: it was, that was their example. Parmesan cheese. Totally. So, because some of these researchers, they've literally bottled and if you just give somebody the scent of Parmesan cheese. Now if you're at a olive garden. You're watching them freshly grade that Parmesan, you're like, that's a great smell. But if you are just Parmesan cheese that smells like Bo,

katy: yeah. If you're just wearing it as body [00:24:00] spray.

laura: Same with baby poop. Baby poop is inherently a bad smell unless it triggers your like maternal memories. And then you might be like nostalgic about baby poop smell. Like it's really weird the way that it works.

katy: Yeah.

laura: So I just wanted to finish up with the two other most popular scents. , And again, these are just molecules and they did this test by like bottling these molecules.

So whereas you are getting like a, this is a disgusting smell cocktail. These are like, these are just pure flavors

katy: pure, yeah, yeah,

laura: So number two, it is, it's a fruity pineapple like smell made of et Ethan butyrate. So pish smell. I was like, okay, of all the fruits, pineapple smell pretty dang good.

katy: yeah, it does. I, I'm definitely the citrus, like growing up I was the cucumber melon from the, from the Path and Body Works line, you know what I mean? That was the quintessential

laura: or sweet pea.

katy: Yeah, yeah, yeah,

laura: I love honeysuckle [00:25:00] smell. And then third is spicy floral. So like lavender, which I actually don't.

katy: lavender would be a spicy floral.

laura: spicy floral and it's made of a compound called lilu. That's the third most popular smell. I like the smell of lavender.

Okay. I do not like the taste of lavender, and I think lavender's overrated,

katy: yeah, I don't, lavender was always one where, because it's supposed to help calm and relax you, and I think it's because it's a floral thing. If I would ever get bath salts or something, it actually gives me a headache. And, and, and that's for me, that's my biggest thing besides, I have or used to have asthma and stuff.

And so those scents are just like too much. But I get lavender is one ti 10 times outta 10, I'm gonna get end up getting a headache with it.

laura: Yeah. It doesn't really relax me. Actually. I was thinking if I want like a relaxing smell, it is probably something a pine or like.

katy: Princess Princess. Dirty Toes over there. You're like, [00:26:00] I crave the woods.

laura: woodsy smells. Or like, you know, like Christmasy smells,

katy: Oh my gosh, yes. My favorite, my favorite like nostalgia smell by far is, , a lot of candles make 'em, it's like a spiced apple one, like the spiced apple, because that's like a good, Christmas meal and I

laura: You're like, bam, I'm right back there. Well, and so I was thinking to myself as I'm writing this, so , okay, if I had to choose , top five favorite smells, I was like really struggling. But I was like, okay, honeysuckle. 'cause that particular, if

katy: That's a good

laura: that flower that just smells so good and like spring, summertime,

katy: Yeah.

laura: , The woods after it rains.

So like that earth smell, not even like the, not the stone, like, you know, what's it, Petco, not Petco. The actual Earth damp smell, , old

katy: Not the rain. I want wet earth.

laura: old Spice, the deodorant. My, both my grandfather and both my parents used to wear that. So it's like very nostalgic.

katy: For me, my dad always wore, before he passed, he was a [00:27:00] Stetson guy, but it was a mix of Stetson with his body odor. So I've smelled Stetson scents and I'm like, ah, not quite, like it's not quite there.

laura: Well, I got this. And then because I'm the one that buys all the products for this house, I just decide what Justin needs to wear on his head or body. So he likes head and shoulders shampoo, but I only buy him the old Spice smell kind. Oh my gosh, it smells so good.

Baking chocolate chip cookies, I was like, okay, if I have to choose a food, that one and then a barn, I just really like the smell of a barn.

katy: Okay. Is it the barn or is it leather? Because I love,

laura: both. Yeah. 'cause like, I like the smell of the hay. I don't mind the smell of

katy: this is gonna, this is sound really weird for me. It's the tack like, or the horse, because they call it horse tack, you know, like the, all

laura: in a leather shop, it does smell so good. There's something, I think the whole thing is very like, yeah, it's just like nostalgic. Something about the barn smell. So yeah. That human beings were very selective about scents.

But good [00:28:00] luck finding someone who's the exact same favorite smell, and you're never going to find someone who smells, thinks the exact same way as you.

katy: Yeah. Interesting, interesting. All

laura: So what's the other worst smell? I guess,

katy: I guess. I guess,

oh, well then I'm gonna talk about is skunks.

laura: Okay.

katy: , Because again, I feel like for the most part, it's one that people can, for the most part, recognize. So there are, I'm gonna give a brief overview about skunks. There's 10, there's dense species, most of which live in the Americas. They range from the hooded skunk in Central America to the spotted skunk, which really isn't spotted per se.

It's more disconnected lines

laura: Yeah,

katy: But today we're talking about, in particular the Stripe Co. The stripes,

laura: the striped kind.

katy: the stripe kind. The stripe, skunk. Uh, meth, meth, meth, [00:29:00] M-E-P-H-I-T-I-S.

laura: Okay.

katy: Because it is the most widespread, the most studied and the most likely one that your dog is gonna end up coming back smelling because it is so

laura: Yeah,

katy: within the us.

Yeah. So if you guys don't know for those listeners, 'cause we do have listeners from all over the world, rundown of a skunk. They're about 22 to 30 inches long. Sorry, I didn't convert all these in the metric.

laura: say you're talking to, for those of you outside the United States, but I'm not gonna

katy: Dinner. Let me just tell you in all the measuring systems that you're not gonna understand, basically it's the size of a house cat.

We'll just say that. It's about the size of a house cat. They're omnivores. Yeah, they're omnivores. They eat insects, grub, berries, small mammals, bird eggs if they need to. But they're also happily raid a trash can or compost if it's available. They live around three years in the wild, but can live up to 10 years in captivity.

They're, for the most part, nocturnal, solitary. For the most part, chill. Unless they feel cornered and then it's, yeah, it's all [00:30:00] over. Really their only big, not only but one of their only big predators are owls, coyotes, foxes, and sometimes we'll get to 'em, but for the most part, and I'll say here in a second, most things live and learn.

And Fox's coyotes are like, let's not touch that again. Owls are like, don't care that I'm going eat that.

laura: Can't smell it. I'll eat it

katy: right.

laura: I should say.

katy: Yeah, so Stripes skunks are easily recognized by their bold, black and white warning coloration, which is again, other than it being like a bright orange or yellow or something, how that contrast is like a, Hey, don't try me kind of thing.

And unlike other creatures that kind of can bluff it, skunks, definitely back it up. And it all comes down to the chemistry and the precision. That these skunks have. So the striped skunk is equipped with a pair of anal scent glands located just inside the base of the tail. And they're not your average musk glands, they're more two chemical cannons.

'cause they do [00:31:00] shoot, you know?

laura: Yeah. 'cause other musk glands, they smell bad, but they're used for marking territory, rubbing on things, not firing.

katy: Not firing. Yeah. So they have muscular control and a built in nozzle system, which is. It's make sure my sun isn't listening. It's similar to a nipple, , of the a, of the glands, and it allows the skunk to aim and fire this weapon up to fairly near accuracy, up to about, about 10 feet away. But it does, it's not gonna just spray.

It does give you plenty of warning signs. It's gonna stomp their feet first. They're gonna turn around and raise their tail like I am warning you. I'm warning you. And then if you don't get the message.

So the science behind the skunk stink what's in the spray, the real fenders of the group, they're a mix of sulfur containing compounds called thiol ths. If you've ever smelled a gas leak. Or cracked open a rotten egg.

You've selt, you've smelt

laura: Yeah.

katy: a thiol. [00:32:00] The main chemical villains in the skunk spray include E two butane one, thiol three methyl, one butane meth, methyl methyl, sorry, and then two qua lane meth methylene thiol.

laura: Okay.

katy: But those compounds are extremely volatile. And most importantly, they're hydrophobic, so they stick to oil, they stick to oily skin and fur and do not wash off

laura: With water. Yeah.

katy: Yeah. , They're very chemically persistent, meaning that once they're in your clothes or hair, they're not going away anywhere without a fight. So, and just to make it worse though, the skunk spray also contains thio Acetates, which are odalis at first. Decompose slowly into thiols over time. So you have those thiols and then you have those other things, those thiol, thio acetate that.

So it's like a double, A double, [00:33:00] yeah. Delayed release stink system, essentially.

laura: This gunk is you're gonna suffer now and then you're gonna keep suffering so that you never touch my kind again.

katy: exactly. And the skunk spray glands are loaded with about 15 milliliters, which is roughly like three teaspoons. Which doesn't sound like a lot, but it's a lot. Whenever you're talking about something that doesn't wanna wash off, it's super volatile, like it aerosolizes so quickly.

laura: are like gagging, it's like pepper

katy: gosh, yes.

Yeah. And they can fire up to five or six sprays before they run out and need 10 days, a week and a half or so to quote unquote re reload. So yes, some skunks can spray accurately enough to hit a target in the eyes, which can cause temporary blindness, and just regret from the poor animal.

laura: Regret and so much regret.

katy: right. So why does a skunk do this? I feel like it's obvious, but they go to such great [00:34:00] lengths because it really doesn't wanna fight. It wants to avoid conflict altogether. Skunks are, for the most part, slow. They're very low to the ground animals. Without closet are really built for combat or legs built for running.

Really? , Have you ever seen a, I mean they're really adorable, but they're not like predator big fighting

laura: Yeah.

katy: So again, the the coloring that they have, everything that they do is just like a police stay away from anything. , And like we said earlier, great horned les are one of the very few predators that will still go for it time and time again.

Whereas most other animals once because of. The lingering effects of being, why is it so effective? Because who wants to go through that a lot? It's literally psychological warfare. Like the skunks or psychological warfare. Yeah. Everything else of just , I'm never gonna go near that. I'm never gonna touch that thing again.

laura: And the other things are creeping up on a skunk and it's pretty hard for, skunks have great hearing and an amazing sense of smell, so it's hard to [00:35:00] sneak up on a skunk, but like an owl is death from above. They don't have time to unload. Right. Like it's, yeah.

katy: Yep. So, yeah, so that was the skunk one. So to wrap up all of this smell stuff,, Laura talked about how, and then we gave examples of good and bad smells. So I just wanna talk for a second about, very briefly on why smell obviously is so important. And I feel like we've touched on a lot of this because a lot of it, whether it is.

Good or bad, it's survival. It's either how you detect danger or it's how stuff we didn't even talk about, talk about how do animals find mates? How do they locate food? How do they, why is this giving me a thumbs

laura: That's amazing. I don't

katy: I just like,

laura: what just happened

katy: I dunno, it's not doing it anymore

laura: not doing anymore. Just one thumbs up only.

katy: And just, you wanna get one thumbs up for you?

A thumbs up just appeared on the screen. Yeah. But yeah, so it's how animals find mates that they locate food, avoid poison, [00:36:00] and yes, even recognize each other in the wild, but it's definitely more.

laura: it, even for humans, it's still a ginormous role. They still think it plays a role in mate selection. Our fair, like we might not even

katy: percent plays a role in mate

laura: Yeah, we're not even always aware of what we're smelling, but psychologically it's doing stuff to us.

katy: Yep. So, and like we touched on earlier, like smell is emotional, like we were talking about. It's the only sense that really does go straight to the limbic system, which controls our brains. Like it's our emotional core of what our brain does, the processing and everything.

And so again, that's why like the scent of sunscreen, for instance, it can that certain sunscreen you can be like, oh, the pool, oh the sun. It just, it hits on that.

laura: and it's not it fades. Like people sometimes have a hard time remembering the way something looked like you were saying,

katy: But not smell.

laura: is something about smell. It never goes away.

katy: Yep. Like my uncle, he has a old like Toyota, FJ Cruiser and his stepdaughters. What'd he tell me? It smelled like. Like old [00:37:00] bus, like an old bus. And it's because of the leather, like the leather seating that he has. It smells like a bus seat. And , so like whenever you're a kid going to school, that's what it smells.

So memory, smell is definitely memory. It's definitely connection. And in a lot of ways it's identity. It's, it tells you what's familiar, what's safe, what's gross, what's nostalgic, what's good, what's bad.

laura: I feel like a lot of people didn't realize how important it was until people lost it from

katy: Oh,

laura: or other problems that have

katy: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. But yeah, so it tells you what's familiar. Like I said, what's safe. And yes, it's yes, it's sometimes it's horrible like a skunk spray, but for the most part a lot of the smells that we encounter are good. So all in a nutshell, smell really is, it's like one of, like we said, it's one of the most unappreciate underappreciated one, but it's how.

Basically life talks to other life. Whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, it's a [00:38:00] non-visual communication.

laura: Yeah,

katy: So yeah, that's, that's, , that's all smells. I was gonna think of something clever to say,

laura: I couldn't think of anything either.

katy: I couldn't think of anything. Well, that's it, folks. , If you. Go check us out on Patreon. We are on, TikTok and everything.

So if you just search the Wildly Curious Podcast on any of the platforms, you'll probably come across us or just, I, I normally link 'em to all of our stuff. Anyway, our episodes, make sure you guys go subscribe to us on YouTube too. We do our full episodes and we do upload the videos there so you can see our faces and everything too.

So next week we'll go back to another mini episode on Swarms. And, until next time, jam out to the song and en enjoy yourselves guys.

laura: Talk to you next week.

katy: Bye.

laura: Bye.