By Layal Liverpool
Credit: Chigusa Tanaka, Japan Monkey Centre
Male ring-tailed lemurs produce a sweet, fruity aroma from glands on their wrists, which seems to bring in women during breeding season. The chemicals accountable for the smell may be the first sex scents determined in primates.
By rubbing their wrists, male ring-tailed lemurs ( Lemur catta) can release chemicals that promote their social rank or mark out their territories. It was not known whether they might likewise produce chemicals to attract females.
Kazushige Touhara at the University of Tokyo, Japan, and his colleagues saw that the female lemurs in their facility tended to sniff the males for about 2 seconds longer throughout the breeding season than outside it. To examine what exactly the women were smelling, they collected secretions from the male lemurs’ wrists and evaluated them in the laboratory.
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” Normally sex pheromones used in wild animals tend to smell bad,” states Touhara.
Analysis of the secretions exposed three chemicals, called aldehydes, which appear to be responsible for the odor.
To test whether the fragrances attracted possible mates, the scientists presented two female lemurs with cotton pads dipped either in secretions from two male lemurs, or watered down services of each of the three chemicals that make them up. They did this during the breeding season.
The women spent a little longer smelling these cotton pads than they did smelling secretions taken from the male lemurs beyond the reproducing season.
Offering testosterone to one male lemur outside the reproducing season induced the production of the exact same sweet scent, recommending testosterone may play a role. Touhara says these chemicals are the very first sex scent prospects identified in primates, although further studies are needed to confirm whether the chemicals in fact result in increased breeding.
” Sniffing and other olfactory habits by females ought to not be analyzed as revealing a choice in relation to male appearance,” says Peter Kappeler at the University of Göttingen, who was not involved with the study. He likewise says that other factors, such as how familiar the female lemurs were with the males, might have affected the quantity of sniffing observed in the study.
If these are pheromones, they could be beneficial for increasing the reproductive performance of lemurs, which are threatened, states Touhara.
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