Flowering plants employ a wide variety of signals, including scent, to attract the attention of pollinators. In this study we investigated the role of floral scent in mediating differential attraction between two species of monkeyflowers (Mimulus) reproductively isolated by pollinator preference. The emission rate and chemical identity of floral volatiles differ between the bumblebee-pollinated...

Traditionally, dogs contributed to police work by stalking a suspect’s track. During the latter part of the twentieth century, investigators found a new way to employ the canine’s olfactory skills: perform a scent lineup to connect a person with a crime via scent evidence. Dogs trained for scent identification are “specialist, biological devices,” according to Tomasz Bednarek, the Head of the W...

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is regarded as one of the representative network architectures of Future Internet. In this paper, an information-centric architecture called Content-Scent based Architecture (CSAR) will be proposed for mobile ad hoc networks. In CSAR, each content has its special content-scent and can be found by tracing the scent it spreads over the network. The content-sce...

BACKGROUND Differences in floral traits, such as petal color, scent, morphology, or nectar quality and quantity, can lead to specific interactions with pollinators and may thereby cause reproductive isolation. Petunia provides an attractive model system to study the role of floral characters in reproductive isolation and speciation. The night-active hawkmoth pollinator Manduca sexta relies on o...

Floral scent has been studied extensively in the model plant Petunia. However, little is known about the intracellular fate of scent compounds. Here, we characterize the glycosylation of phenylpropanoid scent compounds in Petunia x hybrida. This modification reduces scent compounds' volatility, reactivity, and autotoxicity while increasing their water-solubility. Gas chromatography-mass spectro...

Most mammals scent-mark and a variety of hypotheses have been put forward to explain this behaviour. Differences in the main function of scent-marking between species are likely to be related to differences in social systems. Here, we investigate the functions of scent-marking in a cooperatively breeding carnivore. In the banded mongoose (Mungos mungo), individuals of both sexes commonly breed ...

Human scent evidence can be of critical use in many cases where other types of evidence such as DNA, fingerprints, or fibers are not available. The use of canines within the area of law enforcement scent detection and forensic science often involves locating general human scent but is increasingly related to their ability to correctly match a human scent sample with its originating subject. Var...

Female mate choice based on male phenotypic traits is controversial in lizards, particularly in territorial species. In this study, we examine female choice of male scent marks in a territorial lacertid lizard (Podarcis hispanica) in which scent marks have been shown to signal male size (i.e., an important determinant of competitive ability in this species). Females were simultaneously exposed ...

We investigated sexual and seasonal patterns in scent-marking behaviour of the honey badger, by direct observations of habituated individuals (five females, four adult males, two young males). Four categories of scent-marking behaviour were identified: (1) scent marking at latrines; (2) token urination in holes along the foraging path; (3) squat marking at single-use sites; and (4) functional e...

—Many studies have examined seed removal by rodents without regard to possible biases from inadvertent olfactory cues left by the researcher. I compared removal rates of seeds that had direct contact with human skin (scent treatment) with those that had no direct contact (no-scent treatment). Seeds of two species were alternated at 5 m intervals along a straight transect in a native grassland i...