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Lemurs are adorable ring-tailed creatures that are found only in the islands of Madagascar, according to a new study, the aroma of lemurs worsens when they are injured, and other lemurs can detect their weakness by the smells left by them.
This also creates an additional problem for the injured lemur because after discovering the weakness and inability to defend themselves, the other males in the group show more aggression toward them.
"Our study shows that the physical injuries of peers attenuate the signature of the odor of an animal, and in a manner that its counterparts can detect," says professor of evolutionary anthropology Christine Drea.
The study was conducted at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, and was submitted to the Journal of Scientific Reports.
While humans are always interested and curious to find weakness in other people, they are competing with and using strange methods to find them, these primitive animals can simply feel it.
The way they smell makes a big difference in the position of a lemur in their groups, the male and female lemurs have very strong scent glands in the genitals, and they secrete a substance that leaves an odor intense fetid.
Like many other animals, lemurs spread these smells to mark their territory, as a warning and for mating. Just by the smell left by a lemur female, a male lemur can distinguish if it is ready for mating. It also attracts many male lemurs to follow one woman and many times causes conflict and fighting between them.
"The breeding season is a period of increased stress," Drea said. In other words, they can not realize the full potential of their natural scent because odor signals are energetically expensive and can not be simulated easily to fool rivals or potential partners. Said Drea.
The odor left by a lemur can vary a lot, the odor signal left by them is a combination of 200 to 300 different types of chemicals.
The smell is "very pungent and musky," said Rachel Harris, who led the research as a postdoctoral fellow in evolutionary anthropology at Duke. "For research, the team collected samples of wounded lemurs odor using cotton swabs, other tests by methods of gas chromatography-mass spectrometry unveiled the changes in odor, the injury decreased the number of chemical compounds that they secreted by more than ten percent.
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