Tip of the Tongue Many animals use noses to smell. Some don’t. Instead, they use their tongues and other body parts to collect smells. Take a Gila monster, for example. It crawls


across the desert looking for food to eat. Its forked tongue flicks in and out of its mouth. With each flick out, the Gila monster’s


tongue picks up smells. Some of them float in the air. Others are on objects the reptile touches with its tongue. With each flick in, its tongue touches the roof of its mouth. Nerve cells there pick up the smell information and send it to the reptile’s brain. T at’s what happens when a Gila monster’s


tongue lightly touches a bird’s nest. Its tongue flicks back into its mouth. In seconds, the reptile knows it’s found food. In a flash, the Gila monster swallows the


bird whole. T en its sharp teeth punch holes into the birds’ eggs. It gobbles up the soupy insides. It eats so much, it won’t need to hunt again for months.


Sticking Up for Smells Insects may have the oddest way to catch smells. T ey don’t have noses. Instead, most insects breathe through holes in their sides. T at’s not where their sense of smell is located, though. Insects smell with their antennae. A moth is a good example. Two feathery


antennae stick up from its head. Each one is covered in tiny pores, or holes. A single antenna can have 18,000 pores. Smell molecules enter the moth’s antennae


through these holes. T ere, the smells reach the moth’s smell receptors. Information about the smells zips to the moth’s brain. Now it can find nectar to drink. It can also find a mate. One kind of moth can even smell a mate more than 11 kilometers away.


Power of Smell For the moth, smell is one of its most important senses. It’s the same for the shark and the mole and many other animals. T ese animals depend on their sense of


smell to find food and stay alive. T at may explain why their sense of smell is so much better than ours. Yet our sense of smell still comes in handy.


It warns us of danger when something’s on fire. It tells us when it’s time to change our stinky clothes. It lets us know when cookies are baking in the oven. T at’s nothing to sniff at.


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This Gila monster smells with its tongue.


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