There are a lot of mysterious in the world and one of them is how sharks manage to navigate a straight path between far-away locations in the ocean. It turned out that a few sharks could be using their noses for pointing out the way. Or, it might be the case that they use their keen sense of smell that is so critical in prey hunting.

On Wednesday, PLOS ONE carried a study, which concluded that olfaction seems to contribute to shark ocean navigation, probably on the basis of their ability to sense chemical changes in the water when they swim. For the first time ever, that smell has been identified, though such a thing was earlier hypothesized with sharks and other species like birds and turtles.

While speaking to FoxNews.com, Andrew Nosal, a post-doctoral researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Birch Aquarium, said, “We’ve known for a long time that sharks are capable of long distances migration. They travel long distances along fairly straight paths. That begged the question: how exactly do they do it? What sorts of cues do they use to find their way?”

For testing their smell theory, Nosal along with his colleagues captured 26 leopard sharks off La Jolla, California and moved them nearly 6 miles off shore. They temporarily sense of smell of half of the sharks by stuffing their ostril-like nares with a cotton ball soaked in petroleum jelly, and then released them with acoustic trackers attached.

Researchers ensured that captured sharks don’t get any hints along the way blocked visual cues by placing a tarp over the holding tank, place strong magnet over the tank to neutralize geomagnetic cues, and minimized any chemical cues by aerating the water from a scuba tank, instead from the offshore atmosphere.

Nosal said they tried to kind of confuse the sharks as they didn’t want the sharks to retrace their steps and find their way back. Nosal added that they even carried out many figure 8 maneuvers on their way out to the open ocean, releasing the sharks in random directions.