Sense of smell is key factor in bird navigation, new study shows

Date: August 29, 2017

Source: University of Oxford

Summary:

How do birds navigate over long distances? This complex question has been the subject of debate and controversy among scientists for decades, with Earth's magnetic field and the bird's own sense of smell among the factors said to play a part. Now, researchers from the universities of Oxford, Barcelona and Pisa have shown in a new experiment that olfaction -- or sense of smell -- is almost certainly a key factor in long-distance oceanic navigation, eliminating previous misgivings about this hypothesis.

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Study on blue tits: Smell first, and then beg

Date: May 12, 2017

Source: Universitaet Bielefeld

Nestling blue tits can discriminate between the smell of other nestlings and adapt their begging behaviour accordingly. This is the outcome of the latest study by Dr. Barbara Caspers and Dr. Peter Korsten from Bielefeld University to be published today on the 12th of May in the journal Functional Ecology.

In this subproject, Dr. Barbara Caspers and Dr. Peter Korsten from Bielefeld University and Marta Rossi from the University of Sussex in Brighton (Great Britain) examined the begging behaviour of seven-day-old blue tit nestlings from a population near the Dutch city of Groningen. 'Blue tit nestlings beg to obtain food from their parents and may have to compete with as many as ten peers in the nest that are not all necessarily full siblings,' explains Dr. Peter Korsten. In earlier studies of other songbirds, it was already found that this competition intensifies when nestlings are competing with non-kin. Then nestlings beg even more intensively for food.

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Study of birds' sense of smell reveals important clues for behavior, adaptation

Date:

July 29, 2015

Source:

Molecular Biology and Evolution (Oxford University Press)

Summary:

From slight sparrows to preening peacocks to soaring falcons, birds have long been known to possess distinct abilities in their sense of smell, but little has been known about the evolution of olfaction. A large comparative genomic study of the olfactory genes tied to a bird's sense of smell has revealed important differences that correlate with their ecological niches and specific behaviors.

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Oriental honey buzzards might stop to smell the pollen

Buzzard identifies food by the pollen smell, yellow color

Date: July 15, 2015

Source: PLOS

Oriental honey buzzards, birds of prey, likely use a combination of their senses of smell and sight to identify nutritious pollen dough balls found in Taiwanese beehives.

Oriental honey buzzards, birds of prey, likely use a combination of their senses of smell and sight to identify nutritious pollen dough balls found in Taiwanese beehives, according to a study published July 15, 2015 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Shu-Yi Yang from National Pingtung University of Science and Technology, Taiwan, and colleagues.

Scientists think that raptors, birds that hunt and feed on other animals, may use their sense of smell to detect food, but this has only been demonstrated in one type of vulture. The Oriental honey buzzard, a bird of prey in Taiwan, regularly forages in apiaries for yellow pollen dough, a softball-sized mixture of pollen, soybeans, and sugar that beekeepers provide as a supplementary food for bees. Since pollen dough is not similar to any naturally occurring food, the authors of this study investigated whether the buzzards identify the dough's nutritious contents using their sense of smell, or perhaps in combination with vision. The authors of the study used a series of experiments where individual birds could choose between two doughs that varied in pollen content or color, to test whether buzzards use the scent of pollen to find their food, and whether the food color influences their preference.

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Crimson rosella uses beak to sniff fellow birds and potential mates, Deakin research finds

IT turns out Polly might be best served ditching that cracker for some cologne.

Researchers at Deakin University have found an iconic Australian bird uses it beak to sniff out its own species, and even potential lovebirds.

Deakin’s Centre for Integrative Ecology found that crimson rosella parrots can recognise each other by a distinct smell left over from their feathers. The finding proves that the colourful creatures are more reliant on their sense of smell than previously thought.

“It has always been said that birds had no sense of smell but these findings indicate that they rely on their olfactory senses to communicate with one another and possibly even choose mates,” PhD student and project leader Milla Mihailova said.

The study relied on nest boxes at Bellbrae and Steiglitz in Victoria over two breeding seasons from 2011 to 2013, to gather its findings.

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How Pigeons May Smell Their Way Home

Nov. 5, 2013 — Homing pigeons, like other birds, are extraordinary navigators, but how they manage to find their way back to their lofts is still debated. To navigate, birds require a 'map' (to tell them home is south, for example) and a 'compass' (to tell them where south is), with the sun and the earth's magnetic field being the preferred compass systems. A new paper provides evidence that the information pigeons use as a map is in fact available in the atmosphere: odors and winds allow them to find their way home.

The results are now published in Biogeosciences, an open access journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU).

Experiments over the past 40 years have shown that homing pigeons get disoriented when their sense of smell is impaired or when they don't have access to natural winds at their home site. But many researchers were not convinced that wind-borne odors could provide the map pigeons need to navigate. Now, Hans Wallraff of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany, has shown that the atmosphere does contain the necessary information to help pigeons find their way home.

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Protecting native birds by manipulating rats' sense of smell

The researchers manipulated the rats' sense of smell to keep them from preying on vulnerable species. Credit: Mal Weerakoon (Phys.org)—Rats' keen sense of smell can be exploited to dramatically reduce their attacks on native birds, researchers from the University of Sydney have shown. The technique could be adapted to protect vulnerable species worldwide. Ads by Google AFM Meets Raman - Bruker solutions combine AFM and Raman without compromise - www.bruker-axs.com "Introduced black rats (Rattus rattus) are a major threat to the conservation of many bird species worldwide so a new method for reducing their impact is good news for conservation," said Dr Catherine Price, a Research Associate from the University's School of Biological Sciences.

Price is the lead author of the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on 16 October. Professor Peter Banks, also from the University's School of Biological Sciences was the other contributing author. "Working with wild populations of black rats in the bushland of Sydney Harbour and Lane Cove National Parks in NSW we discovered that we could increase the survival of birds' eggs without removing a single rat. "An added advantage of this method is that it is not lethal to the predator. That means it is especially suited to protecting a vulnerable prey species when the predator is also endangered or under threat," Price said.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-10-native-birds-rats.html#jCp