{"id":732,"date":"2003-06-10T03:40:40","date_gmt":"2003-06-10T03:40:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=732"},"modified":"2011-05-01T18:34:35","modified_gmt":"2011-05-01T23:34:35","slug":"these-birds-tell-swell-smells-well","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=732","title":{"rendered":"these birds tell swell smells well"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><\/span>You don&#8217;t usually want to get too close to a  colony of seabirds, unless you really enjoy the smell of bird excrement.  But perhaps smelling a crested auklet colony wouldn&#8217;t be so bad &#8212; the  highly social Alaskan seabirds (right) give off the citrusy scent of  tangerines during their breeding season. And that odor may be more than  just a pleasant-smelling anomaly. Julie Hagelin of Swarthmore College  and her team reported in the <em>Proceedings of the Royal Society<\/em> last month  that the auklets may use that scent as a communication device. Though  odors are a common form of communication in other vertebrate animals,  this is the first study to show that birds might use it, too.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">When they meet, auklets press their bills against each other&#8217;s neck  feathers, where the smell is strongest. The researchers speculate that  auklets use the smell to help pick out mates: well-fed birds may produce  more scent. Experiments showed that the auklets are reliably attracted  to that smell, preferring it to animal musk, banana essence, or an  odorless control. Hagelin stated in a press release: &#8220;Our results  provide support for an entirely new mode of signaling in birds, that of  chemical communication. It is a means of interpreting bird behavior that  is just beginning to be realized.&#8221; <\/span><\/p>\n<h6><em>This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the <\/em>Boston Globe&#8217;s<em> Health\/Science section on 6\/10\/2003.<\/em><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You don&#8217;t usually want to get too close to a colony of seabirds, unless you really enjoy the smell of bird excrement. But perhaps smelling a crested auklet colony wouldn&#8217;t be so bad &#8212; the highly social Alaskan seabirds (right) &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=732\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-boston-globe-3","category-news-briefs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=732"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1185,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732\/revisions\/1185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}