How Animals Communicate Via Pheromones

摘要

Powerful messages can be delivered by smell, a fact known long before the means by which they did so was discovered. The ancient Greeks knew that secretions from a female dog in heat were attractive to male dogs. In his beekeepers' manual The Feminine Mon-archie published in 1623, Charles Butler warned that an injured bee's "ranke smell" would attract other angry bees to sting. In the late 19th century, New York's first state entomologist, Joseph Lintner, noted the crowds gathered on the sidewalk outside, looking at the spectacle of 50 wild silk moth males attracted to a virgin female moth in his office window. Lintner correctly observed that the attraction was probably a chemical, detected by the large, elaborate antennae of the males. He predicted that such an irresistible and far-reaching force could be used to control agricultural pest moths, if only chemists could identify and synthesize these powerful molecules.