Orange smelling birds

Splashing on a bit of perfume is one thing, but covering yourself in orange scent is quite another. But that’s what the crested auklet, a small seabird, does to make itself attractive to the opposite sex - the future’s bright, the future’s orange.

Most vertebrates use social odours, allowing them to communicate with each other, know when they are in good and bad moods and, more importantly, know when they are interested in courtship and mating. On the whole though, birds do not, which is rather strange.

Many birds have excellent senses of smell and produce odours of their own - but they don’t use them as chemical signals. However, the crested auklet is no ordinary bird and has a distinctive tangerine-like scent that it uses for courtship. The birds perform a special neck rubbing behaviour to cover themselves in scent, a routine known in the trade as a ‘ruff sniff’.

A group of scientists from the USA and Canada looked at whether the auklets could distinguish between two different types of smell. In the true spirit of experimental research they did this by scooping up a bag full of unfortunate auklets and spraying them with musk and then with banana essence - harsh, but fair game in the world of science.

After much deliberating and perfume spraying this ground-breaking work found that firstly, the auklets didn’t really like musk (no surprises there); secondly, they didn’t mind the banana essence but they didn't go mad for it and, finally, they loved the smell of other auklets - brilliant. No prizes for telling the world that birds like other birds.

[Hagelin, J.C., et al. (2003). A tangerine-scented social odour in a monogamous seabird. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, B. 270, 1323-1329.]

Orange facts:

Orange trees probably originated in Southeast Asia then moved to Europe and the rest of the world. The Valencia orange is considered to be the world’s most important and popular orange.
Mmmmm, citrus
Florida oranges are often slightly greener than Californian ones due to the night-time temperatures being warmer on the east coast. This causes the green chlorophyll to move into the peel.

The Orange Order was founded in Ireland in 1795 as a Loyalist Protestant organisation promoting the Union with Britain. The name comes from William of Orange (“King Billy”), the Protestant king who defeated the Catholic James II at the Battle of the Boyne (1690).

Agent Orange is the code name for a complicated sounding mix of 2,4-D (2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid) and 2,4,5-T (2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid) - it was a powerful herbicide used during the Vietnam War.