Many animals use their keen senses of smell to find food or escape from predators. Last year, a team of researchers began doing experiments to discover how animals do this. They sent smells at mice or flies and recorded how the animals responded. Smells travel through the air in unusual patterns called odor plumes. Following an odor plume is hard because some parts of the plume have a high concentration of smell while other parts don’t have any smell at all. But animals still use odor plumes to find their way around. The researchers want to learn what kind of information animals get from odor plumes. They also monitored the animals’ brain activity during the experiments. They hope this will help them discover which parts of the brain that the animals use when following a smell.
