Smell Food Research Articles

Jamaican bats can smell food and drive themselves bananas

Imagine that you are approaching home. Suddenly, you come across the smell of your favourite casserole, and it is so strong that you could almost close your eyes and let the smell guide you. While humans can use their sense of smell to decide whether or not that new recipe they just tried is edible, other animals can also take advantage of sniffing around to make their way to delicious food. Now, we all know that bats excel at using echolocation, their unique navigation system to make their way around their environment. However, it turns out that Jamaican fruit-eating bats (Artibeus jamaicensis) can very much exploit their olfactory system to complement their echolocation system and find a delicious treat, such as a banana.To expand on what we already know about Jamaican bats and their smelling capabilities, Alyson Brokaw and Michael Smotherman from Texas A&M University, USA, with Evynn Davis from Johns Hopkins University, USA, and Rachel Page from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama, collaborated in a fun new study where they set a group of Jamaican bats the exciting challenge of identifying a succulent banana using their sense of smell alone. Placing five stands (four holding banana-shaped sponges and another holding a real banana) in an almost-dark medium-sized chamber, Brokaw and her collaborators allowed the inimitable flying mammals to roam around the room in search of the true banana. However, bats are very smart and could just use their echolocation system to identify the real deal. So, to account for this, Brokaw and her collaborators performed a second experiment where they replaced the real banana with a fifth banana-shaped sponge soaked in a delicious banana-scented syrup and waited to see how the bats reacted.Over the course of several days and multiple trials, Brokaw and colleagues measured the number of times the bat landed on the right target in both experiments, in addition to calculating the animals’ instantaneous velocity and their vertical distance from the target before they decided to land on the true or fake banana scented with syrup. It turned out that the Jamaican bats were correct 87% of the time and selected the scented targets, whether they were the real deal or the banana decoy. Also, the bats tended to slow down and get as close as 6 cm above the targets, swooping low at least 2 or 3 times to take a good sniff before they decided to land on their prize.So, bats can use their olfactory system to tease out the good from the bad targets by inspecting their options with their noses. Understanding how bats navigate their environment is important because it allows us to predict how changes in the landscape could have a direct impact on these animals. Bats are very clever animals: not only can they use spatial memory and echolocation to get a good idea of the landscape but they can also combine their olfactory and echolocation systems to decide which is the best banana hanging from the tree. Who knows, maybe Jamaican fruit-eating bats are as good at finding ripe bananas as pigs are at locating luscious truffles.

Food odors decrease longevity via a brain-gut axis.

Zhang et al. describe a neural circuit that reduces lifespan when food-restricted worms smell food. This circuit signals the intestine via octopamine, the invertebrate homolog of norepinephrine, to activate AMPKα. Importantly, norepinephrine signaling also activates AMPKα in mammalian cells, suggesting a conserved mechanism.

Denial of food to the hungry rat: A novel paradigm for induction and evaluation of anger-like emotion

BackgroundAnger is one of the primary emotions that profoundly impacts our daily life. Although the neural basis of anger needs to be explored on high priority, the field has not sufficiently advanced, perhaps due to the lack of a suitable animal model. New methodWe fabricated arenas in which the hungry rat can see and smell food but can not consume it. These animals seemed hyperactive and we monitored the (a) motor activity to access food, (b) biting behaviour, (c) blood pressure, heart rate and nor-epinephrine (NE) in plasma, (d) 5-HT and its metabolite in CSF, (e) effect of diazepam, 5-HT agonist, and antagonist on the behaviour, and (f) expression of immediate early gene in discrete areas of the brain. ResultsThe fasted animal frantically tries to acquire food. It engages in intense biting of the separator plate; the behaviour was considered as an expression of anger-like emotion. These behaviours were attenuated following pre-treatment with diazepam, fluoxetine (both ip) or 5-HT1A receptor agonist (icv), but potentiated by 5-HT1A antagonist (icv). Concomitantly, an increase in the blood pressure, heart rate and NE in plasma, but a decrease in 5-HT and 5-HIAA in the CSF was noted. The animals showed activation of neuronal c-Fos in different brain areas compared to fasted or refed controls. Comparison with existing methodsA novel animal paradigm for assessment of anger. ConclusionsThe protocol enables us to generate and evaluate anger-like responses in rat and permits insights into the neurological basis of anger.

Increased Gastric Activity on Myocardial Perfusion Imaging.

We anecdotally observed an increased accumulation of (99m)Tc-tetrofosmin in the stomach of myocardial perfusion patients when their uptake phase coincided with preparation of hamburgers in an adjacent room for gastric emptying studies on other patients. The potential for a scent-stimulated alteration of gastric biodistribution required further investigation. An experimental group and a control group were enrolled (20 patients per group). The experimental group could smell food being prepared during the uptake phase. Stomach, heart, and background regions were drawn in multiple projections, and the resulting data were evaluated. The experimental and control groups did not significantly differ in stomach counts per pixel, background-corrected counts per pixel, or heart-to-stomach ratio. Further analysis of the data revealed that women had a significantly higher increase in stomach counts (P = 0.022) and background-corrected stomach counts (P = 0.018) than men. Women had a greater increase in gastric (99m)Tc-tetrofosmin activity than men during the radiopharmaceutical uptake phase, but there was no causal relationship between an increase in activity and olfactory stimulation from the cooking of food.

Conflicts between People and the Florida Black Bear

An adult black bear may eat up to the equivalent calorie content of 38 Big Mac sandwiches a day, and can smell food from one to two miles away. Garbage is the main attractant, but bears are also attracted by bee hives, pet food, barbeque grills, fruit trees, and bird (or wildlife) feeders. Conflicts between people and black bears arise when people fail to remove or secure potential food sources. In their search for food, black bears may damage property and threaten, injure, or kill pets and livestock in order to gain access to their feed. This 5-page fact sheet provides tips for preventing human-bear conflicts and tells how to report conflicts if they happen. Written by Elizabeth F. Pienaar and published by the UF Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, September 2014.

Presidential Address 2012 Creating Inclusive Communities: Pathways to the Vision

In the words of Shafik Asante (2002), a former leader of New African Voices in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, ‘‘Inclusion entails recognition of our universal ‘oneness’ and interdependence. Inclusion is recognizing that we are ‘‘one’’ even though we are not the ‘‘same’’ (p. 1). Fighting for inclusion involves assuring that support systems are in place to ease the person’s entry into social and civic life. Providing and maintaining support systems are civic responsibilities, not a favor to the less fortunate. We were all born ‘‘in.’’ Society will immediately improve at the point we honor this truth! Inclusion, therefore, really means accepting, embracing, and celebrating the gifts, talents, and differences in all of us as a means of shaping communities that are welcoming places for all people (Asante, 2002). The notion of inclusion has, in one form or another, been a motivating force for reform in the field of intellectual and developmental disabilities throughout the past 30 years. Conceptually, inclusion has evolved from an aspiration linked to place to one tied to participation, choice, and relationships. Probably the earliest expression of the idea of normalization was advanced by Bengt Nirje (1969/ 1994). The notion was further elaborated on in 1972 by Wolf Wolfensberger in his piece on normalization. He used the concept of normalization or social role valorization to criticize, among other things, infantilizing decorations and language and inadequate day activities. As the concept of normalization was refined and honed, it spawned more encompassing aspirations, such as community integration and community membership (Bradley, Ashbaugh, & Blaney, 1994). The notion of community integration was directly related to the movement of people out of institutions and implied a re-entry by those who had been excluded. Likewise, community membership implied joining a fellowship from which one had been alienated. Conceptions that stressed integration and community-based services also influenced public policy, which in turn influenced practice. Phrases such as ‘‘least restrictive environment’’ and ‘‘mainstreaming’’ emerged as part of the landmark right to education legislation. Class action lawsuits brought during the 1970s also echoed these notions, including the Halderman v. Pennhurst (1977) litigation, which found a right to habilitation in the community. These powerful legal ideals had a transformative impact on the delivery of educational as well as residential and day services for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. As fewer and fewer children and adults left their communities to receive services and as institutional populations began a precipitous decline, the ideals that emerged to goad the system had less to do with opposition to a dominant norm (e.g., exclusion, extrusion, institutionalization, alienation) and more to do with affirmative notions of equality and the accommodation of differences. No longer was the system exhorted to provide better surroundings and opportunities than those available in the institutions, but to facilitate supports that would allow people with intellectual and developmental disabilities to lead lives available to all other citizens; in other words, to invite in those who had been traditionally locked out of our communities. The basis for judgment is now whether people with disabilities are able to enjoy such shared ‘‘goods’’ as relationships, friendships, home ownership, real jobs, spiritual fulfillment, and exercise of personal choice. These assumptions about what constitutes satisfying life have come to be known as inclusion (Bradley, 2000). The concept is relevant to the whole of society in that all people are unique with unique capacities. Everyone can learn and grow. Everyone has gifts to share and desire opportunities to make contributions. These assumptions do apply to everyone, no matter who they are. With this as a backdrop, the INTELLECTUAL AND DEVELOPMENTAL DISABILITIES VOLUME 49, NUMBER 5: 360–364 | OCTOBER 2011

Problems in the Land Vertebrate Zoogeography of Certain Islands and the Swimming Powers of Elephants

The presence of fossil elephants on certain islands off California, in the Mediterranean, in Indonesia, and off China has led to two widely accepted assumptions: (1) that elephants, being poor swimmers, could not have swum to the islands and therefore must have walked to them, which indicates that (2) land bridges once joined the islands to the mainland. These two assumptions have profoundly influenced various insular biogeographic and geologic reconstructions on and around these islands. New evidence, however, shows unequivocally that living elephants are excellent distance swimmers. They swim in a lunging, porpoise-like fashion while using their trunk as a snorkel. Elephant swimming speeds have been measured up to 2.70km/h, and maximum distances estimated at 48 km. Their chief motives for swimming seem to be that they can see the islands and smell food on them. Because elephants are excellent distance swimmers, we must re-appraise the origin of land vertebrates on all the islands that held elephants, as well as reappraise the geologic reconstructions that assumed land bridges once connected these islands to the mainland.