Most pet cats form strong bonds with their caretakers and appear to find their presence reassuring. However, unlike human babies, cats don’t accept scent alone as a worthy stand-in for the people they have bonded with, says Kristyn Vitale at Unity College in Maine.

“Olfaction is an important sense for cats, and it’s related to their social behaviour, but in our study, [owner-scented objects] did not have a stress-reducing effect,” she says. “The smell might even make matters worse for some cats.”

— Read more in Cats refuse to snuggle with objects that smell like their owners at NewScientist.

“This is pretty exciting, as it is the first clear demonstration of hummingbirds using their sense of smell alone to make foraging decisions and avoid contact with potentially dangerous insects at a flower or feeder,” said senior author Dr. Erin Wilson Rankin, a researcher in the Department of Entomology at the University of California, Riverside.

— Read more in Hummingbirds Use Sense of Smell to Make Foraging Decisions: Study at Sci News. (You can find the original paper here.)

The team found Piper fruit scent bouquets were complex and diverse. The authors identified and quantified 249 VOCs [volatile organic compounds] in ripe fruit scents across 22 Piper species. Some compounds were found in the fruit scent of most species—like alpha-caryophyllene, which has a spicy scent like cinnamon or cloves. Others, like 2-heptanol, were only found in a few Piper species.

The diet experiments showed that, while the three Carollia fruit bat species varied in their reliance on Piper as a food source, all consumed a lot of a few Piper species, and a little of many others.

— Read more in Scent Is Key to How Bats and Peppers Co-evolved to Survive: New research details how bats and pepper plants in Central America have co-evolved to help each other survive at Futurity.