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A novel study found that geckos use the smell of other geckos to differentiate them from other members of their species, a University of Bern published early February determined.
The study, published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Animal Cognition by Springer, discovered that Geckos actually use their tongues to sense the odor of other gecko subspecies.
— Read more in Geckos can distinguish between species by odor, study finds at The Jerusalem Post.
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Because ants lack noses, they use olfactory receptors on their antennae to help them find food or sniff out potential mates. For the study, published Jan. 25 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences(opens in new tab), scientists trained nearly three dozen silky ants (Formica fusca) to use these acute olfactory receptors for a different task: finding tumors.
— Read more in Ants can detect the scent of cancer in urine at LiveScience.
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As forest-dwelling animals, they are small and secretive deer, and while their barking call is a handy indicator for humans looking to photograph muntjac, they do most of their interspecies communication through scent. On the faces of muntjac deer are two sets of scent glands; the preoribital which sits just in front of the eyes, and the frontal glands that sit on the forehead. While they’re not the only hoofed mammals to have these glands, they use them for communication more often even than other deer species that live in larger groups.
— Read more in Muntjac Deer Have Bizarre Flaring Scent Glands On Their Face at IFLScience.
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But Donut, she says, likely has another trick up her furry leg that we humans don't use to tell time (or at least we don't realize we use): "That's olfaction," [Alexandra] Horowitz says. "Dogs are living in basically an olfactory world, and I think they are able to track time with smells."
— Read more in Can dogs smell time? Just ask Donut the dog at NPR.
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Recently, Debajit Saha, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Michigan State University, and his team tapped into the odor-sensing circuitry of the locust brain to detect the scent signatures of human oral cancers. Saha previously used locusts for sniffing out bombs, making the transition to cancer detection an interesting one.
— Read more in Scents and Sense-Abilities: Using Bug Brainpower to Smell Cancer at TheScientist.