Do fish have a good sense of smell???

Answer 1

As SeaDragon explained, many fish have superlative senses of smell. It's not universally true, since fish are a very diverse group, but in general, most fish have much more acute senses of smell than terrestrial animals.

Chemosensory detection works better in wet environs where the chemicals (i.e. scents) to be detected are dissolved in solution rather than airborne. Even our own olfactory and taste detection depends upon a moist environment to capture and dissociate the chemicals (think of how things taste, or rather don't taste when you have a dry mouth).

Fish like sharks have tremendous powers of olfactory detection. They can sense concentrations of blood in the water in the order of one part per billions. This allows them to find dying or injured prey from miles and miles away. If you look at their brains, the bulbs of sensory information processing neurons attached to their nares are each larger than the entire rest of the brain put together. The rest of the shark is basically just an carrying vessel intended to carry the nose from place to place.

In salmon, their sense of smell is so acute they can detect the minute traces of river water entering into the ocean, and tell the difference between different river inputs to find the one that they themselves originally spawned in, and use that to follow the river back up to their spawning grounds.

Answer 2

Fish have a very sensitive sense of smell. How sensitive? They can detect concentrations of chemicals as low as one part per trillion.

Check this article on baby fish "smelling their way home"
http://www.theallineed.com/biology/07020610.htm

And:
Smell, is an important sense for many fish. Those little holes that look like nostrils are called nares. Nares don't lead to the throat the way nostrils do in mammals, but open up into a chamber lined with sensory pads. Not all fish move water in and out through these nares in quite the same ways, but key to a strong sense of smell for fish is the ability to move water rapidly over these sensory pads. Some fish can pick up chemical signals when immobile by pumping water through their olfactory system via tiny hairs called cilia. Other fish can pump water by a muscular movement. Some fish, such as smaller species of mackerel, have an olfactory system that requires them to swim in order to get water moving through their nares. When the sensory pads pick up chemical signals, they transmit them to the fish's forebrain, which interprets the signal and incites the fish to respond appropriately.

http://amos.indiana.edu/library/scripts/fishnares.html

Answer 3

No...Never...Their sense of smell is less needed in water where oxygen is present with Sea water...and thtats why they need less sense so god created dem n gave them a poor sense of smell...its not that they cant smell at all....but very less as compared to Land animals.......But there's a fact that the Blue Whale can smell very niucely...and is recorded for the most smell sensored fish (marine)..

Hope this helped...frnd....^_^

Answer 4

Haysoos and Seadragon are right on. But also think of sharks. They can smell one drop of blood in millions of drops of water.

Answer 5

yes because if a shark can sens heat and one drop of blood in the water over millions of gallons of water so yes they do.

Answer 6

not compared to other animals.