Can you Smell Like a Shark?

Today we are going to a beach in North Wales to help collect and count shark eggs as part of a citizen science project.

To help us learn a it more about sharks, we did a great activity about how sharks smell.

The North Wales Wildlife Trust has great activities on their website that are for families and children to better explore their coastlines. Although, this is for Wales, it is equally relevant for us in the Maritimes!

See cool activities from the North Wales Nature Trust.

There are challenges, activities and creative crafts all listed here on the website.

We selected the Shark Sense Test to try.

Smell sense test

Sharks use their sense of smell to detect their food from far off. They can smell as little as 1 drop of

blood in 1 million drops of water.

We wanted to see if we were as good as a shark!

We set up 8 glasses of water, as per the instructions.

Each cup contained a more diluted solution of water and lemon juice, until the final cup was full of just water for a control.

We then smelled each cup.

We each marked down where we could no longer smell the lemon juice in the water. Then we did the taste test and did the same thing.

Unfortunately, none of us could smell like a shark!

We all stopped smelling or tasting the lemon juice around cup 3-4 (1 part in 100 or 1 part in 1000).

Interestingly, their father could smell and taste even less, as taste buds start to go when you get older. We would love to try this experiment with a variety of ages!