What makes skunks spray smell

Then it will turn its tail so the two glands on either side of its anus line you up. Skunks can fire fluid for up to 5 metres and the smell can carry on the wind for up to 1km! Skunk spray has been described as a combination of rotten eggs and burning tires. The key ingredients are sulphur-based , oily chemicals called thiols.

Thiols also occur in decomposing flesh and fecal matter, so our revulsion to the smell makes sense. If this stinkorific spray hits you or your pet, what should you do? For a long time, no effective solutions existed to deal with getting skunked.

You may have heard about tomato juice , but apparently this does not remove the smell, it just distracts your nose with another smell. Along comes a chemist named Paul Krebaum , who was working with thiols for other reasons.

He wanted to get rid of the smell and this is what he came up with. So while thiols make skunk spray the vile thing that it is, they also make garlic tasty, and form parts of the keratin in hair. When you perm your hair, you're rearranging the thiol groups. The two leg-breakers in the family of chemicals that a skunk sprays are E butenethiol and 3-methylbutanethiol.

These are chains of carbon and hydrogen with the sulfur and hydrogen thiol group attached to one end. They're volatile, which means they disperse easily in the air, and they're easily picked up by the human nose. The back-up squad of skunk spray consists of thioacetates, other groupings of carbon and hydrogen that are, at first, not particularly smelly. When water hits them, it rearranges them into more potent configurations.

A dog - or human - that's been sprayed by a skunk will sometimes get smellier after being bathed in water. These compounds also linger, so when an area of a house that's been sprayed by a skunk gets rained on, we get a delayed reminder never to make a skunk mad. How to get the stench out? Tomato juice won't do it. The skunk may stamp its feet.

Via two nipple-like independently-rotating squirters that flank the anus, the skunk will take aim and fire away. The skunk wants to control accuracy and distance so as to not waste the precious liquid, he says. Skunk spray is a thiol , an organic compound with sulfur as a principal component.