Standing at the beach and taking a deep breath, there is a smell of sulfur and salty sea water. But why can you tell that it’s the smell of sea water? What chemicals in the ocean are responsible for that unique ocean smell?
No chemicals can create the same smell as sea water. The smell you smell at the beach and the smell of seafood you eat are all composed of different combinations of various molecules. The following three are the most common smells that marine life spreads in the ocean through activities such as mating, death, and fish feeding.
Dimethyl sulfide - the odor of the coast
One of the most common and easily understood ocean odor components on the coast is dimethyl sulfide (DMS for short) ). Food scientists use various descriptions to describe the taste of DMS, such as green, sulfuric, clammy, boiled cabbage, and creamed corn. This smelly sulfur compound is found in many foods, from seaweed to truffles to beer, and is abundant in your farts.
In the ocean, DMS is mostly produced by some bacteria eating phytoplankton. Phytoplankton are tiny organisms that produce energy by absorbing sunlight. They use dimethylsulfoniopropionate (DMSP) as a sunscreen to protect themselves. After death, they release all DMSP, which is produced after bacteria eat and digest it. DMs. Seabirds and other marine life also rely on the smell of DMS to determine where there are more phytoplankton, because those places tend to have a lot of delicious fish.
If you want to have a clear understanding of the taste of DMS, then go to the salt marsh! It's filled with the smell of sulfides, one of which is DMS. In addition to salt marshes, local cheesemaking sites are also a good place to learn about the smell of DMS. Microorganisms on mature cheese such as Brevibacterium and Geotrichum produce very high concentrations of DMS when they break down cheese proteins.
Dictyopterenes - the smell of kelp mating
Love fluid has a smell, and seaweed is no exception. In the 1960s and 1970s, scientists analyzed compounds found in parts of seaweed that have a strong beach smell. When they started to figure out what these compounds did to the seaweed, they found that seaweed eggs contained high amounts of these volatile compounds, and seaweed sperm were easily attracted to them. Although there are various kinds of algae in the ocean, these unique tastes can still accurately attract the same kind of algae so that these algae can survive peacefully.
Brown algae estrogen is one of the sex hormone aromatic amines they disperse, and is also a component of the smell of edible algae (that is, kelp). I (the original author) have never smelled pure brown algae estrogen, but many research reports indicate that it smells the same as dried seaweed. Limu lipoa (a type of seaweed, Phaeophyta, Dictyoptera, Sclerotinia genus), is commonly eaten in Hawaii. It is rich in brown algae estrogen and is often used in stews to bring a strong ocean flavor to dishes.
Bromophenol - food eaten by fish
A large part of the salty taste of wild seafood (including fish, shellfish, oysters, clams, shrimp, crabs) comes from bromophenol . At low concentrations, these chemicals have been described as smelling like sea, crab, or fish. When the concentration is high, you will smell a pungent chemical smell, similar to iodine.
Biologists who study seafood believe that most of these marine organisms do not produce this compound on their own because they eat food, especially marine worms, algae and other marine organisms at the bottom of the food chain. Wild-caught seafood often has a higher concentration of bromophenol, giving it a stronger "seafood" flavor than farmed seafood. During the adaptation process of some fish (such as Pacific salmon) from seawater to freshwater, it was found that the concentration of bromophenol was extremely high when they were caught in the ocean, but almost disappeared after being put into freshwater.
In order to recreate the "seafood taste" of farmed fish, some fisheries will deliberately add bromophenol to fish food, but the results can only be described as mixed success or failure. One risk of this approach is how to control the amount to create a light ocean smell rather than a pungent iodine smell. You can easily pick a fish out of the sea, but it is difficult to inject the smell of the sea into them. Body.