A dog can tell you a lot about the outdoors. When a Lab vacuums the ground with her nose and her tail spins like a helicopter blade, you know a grouse is about to fly. When the dog stops like a dragonfly, then runs off sniffing an invisible path, a snowshoe hare has crossed your […]
Without their keen sense of smell, mosquitoes wouldn’t get very far. They rely on this sense to find a host to bite and spots to lay eggs. And without that sense of smell, mosquitoes could not locate their dominant source of food: nectar from flowers. “Nectar is an important source of food for all […]
Chickadees are interested in scents. That’s the news from a study out of Lehigh University, the first to document naturally hybridizing songbirds’ preference for the smell of their own species. Amber Rice, an evolutionary biologist at Lehigh, studies hybridization — when separate species come into contact and mate — to better understand how species originate […]
For female mosquitoes, finding their next meal is all about smelling and seeing. Through behavioral experiments and real-time recording of the female mosquito brain, a team of scientists, led by researchers at the University of Washington, has discovered how the mosquito brain integrates signals from two of its sensory systems — visual and olfactory […]