These ring-tailed lemurs raise a 'stink' when they flirt with potential mates

November 17, 2017 by Don Campbell

A U of T Scarborough study finds that a unique ritual performed by male ring-tailed lemurs may come at a significant physical cost, but it could help their chances in securing a mate.

"Stink-flirting displays are done more often by dominant males," says Amber Walker-Bolton, lead author and instructor in U of T Scarborough's Department of Anthropology.

"This behaviour is also very costly because these males are met with higher levels of aggression than if they were to do other types of scent-marking, so there's definitely something unique about this type of behaviour."

Ring-tailed lemurs are Strepsirrhinines, a sub-order of primates who share a common ancestor with humans. They are very social animals, living in large groups with females dominating the group. Like other lemurs, they huddle in large groups in order to keep warm and maintain social bonds, with lower ranking males often excluded.

Scent is also incredibly important to ring-tailed lemurs. Males use their scent glands to mark territory and often engage in so-called 'stink-fighting' displays where they rub their tails in their scent before wafting it at an opponent.

While stink-fighting is well known, stink-flirting, where males do scent-wafting displays towards a potential female mate, is less understood. This study is the first to look at these displays and their role in terms of male rank and female mate choice.

"One morning I was watching a huddle and saw an outsider male approach and try to waft his tail to a female. Well, right away he was met with all this aggression from the group, and it made me question why they would go through this just to be met with a negative result," says Walker-Bolton, who did her field research at the Berenty Reserve in Madagascar.

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Date-licious smell for bats

Date: December 22, 2016

Source: Forschungsverbund Berlin e.V. (FVB)

Females of the greater sac-winged bat select their mating partner by smell and unerringly choose a male which differs from them the most in genetic terms. Females with more variants of olfactory receptors of the TAAR-group have an advantage over other females. The results of this study have been released by the Nature Publishing Group in their open access journal Scientific Reports.

Researchers from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW), the University of Ulm, the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin (Leibniz-MfN) and the Fritz Lipmann Institute on Aging (Leibniz-FLI) discovered that "ladies choice" reigns in the greater sac-winged bat. Male bats from Saccopteryx bilineata are considerably smaller than females, so they are not in the position to enforce copulation. "We know that females from other species with low birth rates (like bats) are very choosy when it comes to mate selection," says Pablo Santos, lead author of the study.

So, which general criteria do female bats use to select their partner? Since bats are nocturnal animals, males cannot impress females with complex colour patterns or bizarre courtship dances. It had already been known that Saccopteryx males, beside their mating calls, present a self-made "perfume" to the females during courtship. However, what exactly counts and what makes the males irresistible in the dark -- or puts them out of the question has been a scientific mystery for more than three decades. Now it is unravelled: female bats rely on their nose and use an elaborate set of olfactory receptors.

"Male bats prepare a mixture of urine, saliva and penis secretion in two small skin bags on their wings," explains Christian Voigt, bat expert at the Leibniz-IZW. They spend up to one hour per day on cleaning and filling the bags. Owing to the body heat, the liquid begins to ferment within a short time, emitting an intense smell. Thus, each individual generates a distinctive scent, presumably revealing its MHC genotype.

Continued

Scent guides hawk moths to the best-fitting flowers

May 18, 2016

That the morphology of many pollinators corresponds strikingly to the shape of the flowers they pollinate was observed more than 150 years ago by Charles Darwin. He described this perfect mutual adaptation of flowers and pollinators as the result of a co-evolutionary process. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, have now provided further proof of the famous naturalist's theory. They were able to show that Manduca sexta moths acquired the highest energy gain when they visited flowers that matched the length of their proboscis. The moths were supported in their choice of the best-fitting nectar sources by an innate preference for the scent of matching flowers.

Charles Darwin, the founder of the theory of evolution, was an astute observer of nature. His extraordinary understanding of natural history laid the foundation of his theory about the origin of species. In 1862, he published a book about orchids and their pollinators in which he described the orchid Angraecum sesquipedale, which was cultivated in England but originated from Madagascar. Because of the flower's morphology, Darwin hypothesized that there must be a pollinator in the plant's native habitat with an extraordinarily long proboscis enabling the nectar in the flower to be reached. In 1903, more than 20 years after Darwin's death, such a pollinator was in fact discovered: the hawk moth Xanthopan morganii, which received the subspecies name praedicta (the predicted) in honor of Darwin's hypothesis. This moth has a proboscis which is more than 22 centimeters long.

Biologists use the term "pollination syndrome" when they explain the amazing diversity of flowering plants and pollinators which has emerged as a result of co-evolution. A flower-pollinator system can be highly specialized. Both partners benefit from the relationship: The plant increases the likelihood it will transfer pollen to flowers of conspecifics and not waste it on other species. Specialized pollinators, on the other hand, have an advantage over competing generalist pollinators, which are also foraging for nectar, because their proboscis is better adapted. The disadvantages of such specialization are that the reproductive success of the highly specialized plant wanes when its pollinator is absent, and the survival rate of the pollinator decreases in the absence of the plant as well.

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Scent communication in polar bears explored

Date:

November 4, 2014

Source:

Zoological Society of San Diego

Summary:

Scientists have provided the first systematic examination of the social information polar bears may glean from scent left in the paw prints of other polar bears. The authors also suggest that scent communication in polar bears may be compromised if climate-change driven sea ice losses in the Arctic intensify.

Continued ...

How orchid bees find their personal scent, attract mates

Date:

May 14, 2014

Source:

Ruhr-Universitaet-Bochum

Summary:

A fragrant perfume has brought many a man and many a woman together. Orchid bees, too, appear to rely on scent when it comes to choosing a partner. In the course of their lives, the males compile a species-specific bouquet that they store in the pockets on their hind legs. One day, they release it in order to attract the female, assumes a biologist who studies the flying perfume aficionados' collecting behavior.

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The smell of freshly-cut grass is actually a plant distress call

The lovely scent of cut grass is the reek of plant anguish: When attacked, plants release airborne chemical compounds. Now scientists say plants can use these compounds almost like language, notifying nearby creatures who can "rescue" them from insect attacks.

A group of German scientists studying a wild tobacco plant noticed that the compounds it released - called green leaf volatiles or GLVs - were very specific. When the plants were infested by caterpillars, the plants released a distress GLV that attracted predatory bugs who like to eat the caterpillars in question.

According to Science, where the researchers published their study today:

They found that when these plants are attacked by tobacco hornworm caterpillars,Manduca sexta, the caterpillars' saliva causes a chemical change in the GLV compounds the plants had produced. These modified compounds then attract predatory "true bugs,"Geocoris, which prey on hornworm eggs and young larvae. Although more research will be needed to figure out exactly how the molecules in the caterpillar saliva cause this change in the GLVs, it's clear that the caterpillars themselves cause the change in the GLV signal, the researchers say. It may thus be possible someday to induce the same sort of change via genetic engineering, which might protect plants against pests without encouraging the resistance that pests develop in response to pesticides.

http://io9.com/5623112/the-smell-of-freshly+cut-grass-is-actually-a-plant-distress-call

Big Cats Obsess Over Calvin Klein's 'Obsession for Men'

JUNE 8, 2010

A Certain Animal Magnetism Makes the Fragrance a Hit With Zoos

By ELLEN BYRON

To wine and dine Sasha, a 450-pound Siberian tiger at the Bronx Zoo, try serving beef and rabbit. To lure him for a snack, whip out the frozen treats his zookeepers call "bloodcicles." But to really get his olfactory engines running, you need the secret weapon: Calvin Klein's Obsession for Men.

Zoos have long spritzed perfumes and colognes on rocks, trees and toys in an effort to keep confined animals curious.

In 2003, Pat Thomas, general curator for the Wildlife Conservation Society's Bronx Zoo in New York, decided to get scientific about it. Working with 24 fragrances and two cheetahs, he recorded how long it took the big cats to notice the scent and how much time they spent interacting with it.

The results left barely a whiff of a doubt. Estée Lauder's Beautiful occupied the cheetahs on average for just two seconds. Revlon's Charlie managed 15.5 seconds. Nina Ricci's L'Air du Temps took it up to 10.4 minutes. But the musky Obsession for Men triumphed: 11.1 minutes. That's longer than the cats usually take to savor a meal.

"Oh, yeah, he loves that scent," Mr. Thomas said as Sasha blissfully cuddled up to a tree sprayed with Obsession for Men. "Just look at him."

Mr. Thomas's findings spread quickly through the Wildlife Conservation Society's network of global operations. Now, Obsession is widely used not only in zoos, but in the field, where it has helped produce breakthroughs in wildlife biology and conservation.

As it happens, big cats of all stripes are obsessive when it comes to the scent. Roan Balas McNab, a Wildlife Conservation Society program director in Guatemala, has been using Obsession for Men since 2007 to help study jaguars in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, a protected tropical forest spanning 8,100 square miles.

One of his goals is determining the size of the jaguar population. But the reclusive habits that made the jungle cats an object of reverence for the Maya people also make them difficult to count. In his 14 years working in the reserve, Mr. McNab says he has had only one random spotting of a jaguar.

He and his colleagues rely on heat-and-motion-sensitive cameras stationed along animal trails in the jungle. If they can get jaguars to linger, they can identify individual animals by their unique spot patterns, which are then loaded into a database, much like fingerprint records.

"But this technique is only effective if animals pass through the cameras' detection range and we get adequate photos," Mr. McNab says. Pre-Obsession, some 30% to 40% of the photos were inconclusive.

After hearing through a colleague of Mr. Thomas's scent test, Mr. McNab's field biologists began spraying Obsession for Men near their cameras. Researchers squirted the cologne onto a rag tied to a stake in the ground. The elusive jaguars, which scientists say can detect smells from up to a kilometer away, crept forth. Three times as many of the cats walked by camera stands spiked with the cologne than those without it. Camera footage showed curious cats sauntering up to the scented rag, sniffing it, then lingering nearby. That diversion gave researchers the chance to get clear, full shots of the jaguars and their spot patterns.

Beyond mere counting, the jaguar survey project has begun to capture rarely seen jaguar mating rituals, including a male's coy nipping and days-long pursuit of a potential partner.

"We're just starting to get an idea of how jaguars behave in their habitat," Mr. McNab says. "Before we used Obsession for Men we weren't able to get these images at all."

Obsession for Men launched in 1986, just as the Calvin Klein brand was pushing the boundaries of sexuality in advertising. Early ads typically featured nude models and little else. Today, it remains among the Top 10 best-selling men's fragrances world-wide. The cologne, which is made and marketed under license by privately held Coty Inc., posted sales of about $85.5 million last year, according to estimates by market-data firm Euromonitor International Inc.

The Wildlife Conservation Society says it has shared its research results with Coty, but has not asked the beauty company for sponsorship or product donations. A spokeswoman for Coty declined to comment.

Ann Gottlieb, the "nose" who helped create Obsession for Men, thinks there could be a number of factors in the fragrance that wild animals might find irresistible.

"It's a combination of this lickable vanilla heart married to this fresh green top note—it creates tension," she says. The cologne also has synthetic "animal" notes like civet, a musky substance secreted by the cat of the same name, giving it particular sex appeal, she adds. "It sparks curiosity with humans and, apparently, animals."

The Wildlife Conservation Society's Jaguar Conservation Program plans to expand the use of Obsession for Men to more of its population studies, tentatively scheduled for next year in sections of Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador. "I'd like to use this in every survey that we're involved with," says program coordinator John Polisar.

Obsession works so well that Mr. McNab hesitated at first to reveal its potency, fearing poachers would also use it. But he decided that spreading the word to other scientists outweighed the potential risk, particularly since poachers already use their own effective bait—dead animals—a tactic researchers' ethics forbid.

The challenge for researchers is finding enough of the stuff, given the cologne's price of about $60 and scarcity in shops near the rainforest. Mr. McNab has made a habit of checking duty free shops during his international trips just in case he can snag a good price. He asks friends and colleagues to bring along a bottle when they travel to the region.

The Bronx Zoo relies on donations to keep up its supplies. Stella Miller, president of the Huntington-Oyster Bay chapter of the Audubon Society on Long Island, N.Y., says she has donated about 300 bottles of fragrance, collected from friends and acquaintances over the past five years.

At the zoo, keeper Michelle Medina stores about a dozen fragrances in a large plastic pail amid her supplies for the large Tiger Mountain exhibit. During a recent visit, her sample-sized bottle of Obsession for Men was almost empty.

To keep her cats content, "I'll need to find more of this," she says.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704513104575256452390636786.html
(Submitted by D.R. Shoop)

Family's urine bid to locate dog

A family who tried to lure back a lost dog by leaving a trail of their urine on streets near their home have been criticised by the city council.

The Baltesz family, of Clifton, Bristol, lost their 10-year-old pet labrador Simon on the night of 4 July.

When Simon failed to return, the family chose their unorthodox method.

A Bristol City Council spokeswoman said: "We would not consider this to be a good idea from an environmental health point of view."

Louise Baltesz, 43, said the whole family had been "chipping in" to help lay down the scent trail.
She said she was aware of criticism aimed at the family, but they were willing to do anything to get Simon back.

'Very diluted'
"There are people who are upset about it, but I'm too emotionally drained to think about it," she said. "I'm worried about it - I really am.

"If everyone peed in the street it would be disgusting, wouldn't it? But it's very, very diluted."

Mrs Baltesz said the idea for the scent trail came from a website which offered a range of advice to owners of missing dogs.

She said: "I do feel mad doing it, but I'm driven to desperate measures.

"Apparently it's quite a normal way of doing it. You just put a little bit in a bottle and then top it up with water.

"You put some smelly food down, they come towards the food and then catch the scent [of the urine]. You only have to do it once. We've left two trails."

'Owner's scent'
The family have put up "missing" posters and have received several possible sightings of Simon, who is described as "not very approachable" and naturally timid.

But a vet at a nearby practice was less than optimistic the plan would succeed.

Ian Wills, from the nearby Zetland Veterinary Hospital in Bristol, said: "I think it's an interesting idea but I would be pleasantly surprised if it worked.

"When a dog wanders off from home they will generally wander back when they have had enough.

"If the dog was going to follow the owner's scent it would be from something they wore, like a jumper. Unless they have an incontinence problem."

A Bristol City Council spokeswoman said it was unlikely the authority would take any action against the family.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/bristol/8143103.stm