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 […]
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n the 1820s, painter and naturalist John James Audubon designed an experiment to test if birds had a sense of smell. He dragged a rotten hog carcass into a field, then piled brush on top of it. After none of the local turkey vultures appeared, Audubon concluded that vultures hunted using their eyes alone. […]
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he ability to smell is critical for salmon. They depend on scent to avoid predators, sniff out prey and find their way home at the end of their lives when they return to the streams where they hatched to spawn and die. New research from the University of Washington and NOAA Fisheries’ Northwest Fisheries Science […]