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Re: Feathered Bloodhounds

It seems to me that the "birds don't use scent" thing has to be wrong if only for the fact that Old and New World Vultures have such keen scent abilities. Since they are distantly related, I would have thought smell receptors of a decent amount were plesiomorphic for that clade.

Just a thought from the non-scientific side of the list...

On 19/07/2008, at 12:29 AM, don ohmes wrote:

Up front: the lit sez I was wrong about observable scent-driven behavior (food location, mate recognition, navigation, nest location). Would have nice to post after checking, as opposed to before, but too late for that. O well, I was bound to be wrong someday... as the old man used to say. Sometimes several times in a day.

The 'not using olfaction for predation avoidance' observation still stands, but probably not for long. I always assumed that the eyes/ ears acuity combined w/ flight ability were such that smell never was needed.

Wouldn't be surprising if ostriches were found to be using scent to maintain flight distance, given the other stuff that is out.

Don

--- On Fri, 7/18/08, don ohmes <d_ohmes@yahoo.com>
wrote:

From: don ohmes <d_ohmes@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Feathered Bloodhounds
To: dinosaur@usc.edu
Date: Friday, July 18, 2008, 5:40 AM
Having grown up in the country, I declare my extreme
skepticism on practical grounds. In contrast to deer
hunting: when duck, dove, quail, or turkey hunting one
needs worry not a whit about which way the air is
moving, 
whether one should smoke, or what detergent one's
clothes were washed in.

If the birds whose behavior I am familiar with are
obtaining olfactory information, they are not using
that 
information to avoid predation.

Nor have I observed birds engaged in any scent-driven
behaviors; sniffing each other, altering their route
to
investigate/avoid a source of odor, or just
'testing
the air'. Such behaviors can be observed on a
daily 
basis w/ many mammals, even humans...

If birds have good sniffers, they don't seem to be
getting much bang for their buck. Maybe a
re-examination of 
underlying assumptions is in order, because this one
doesn't pass the smell test.

Don

--- On Thu, 7/17/08, Dann Pigdon
<dannj@alphalink.com.au> wrote:

From: Dann Pigdon <dannj@alphalink.com.au>
Subject: Feathered Bloodhounds
To: "DML" <dinosaur@usc.edu>
Date: Thursday, July 17, 2008, 10:54 PM
Feathered Bloodhounds?
By Greg Miller, ScienceNOW Daily News

... In the new study, a team led by molecular
ecologist 
Silke Steiger and her graduate adviser Bart
Kempenaers at the Max Planck Institute for
Ornithology
in 
Starnberg, Germany, searched for smell-
related genes in nine species representing seven
major 
branches of the avian family tree. They
looked for genes that encode olfactory receptors,
which 
detect odors. Researchers generally
assume that animals with a greater variety of
receptors 
have a better sense of smell. Mice, for
example, have close to 1000 working olfactory
receptor 
genes, and humans have roughly 400...

...the researchers reported online 15 July in the
Proceedings of the Royal Society B. "The
sense of

smell in birds may be as good as that of humans,
and
in 
some cases, even better," Steiger says.

Read more at:


http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2008/716/2 

--



_____________________________________________________________ 

Dann Pigdon
GIS / Archaeologist
http://geo_cities.com/dannsdinosaurs
Melbourne, Australia
http://heretichides.soffiles.com


_____________________________________________________________ 

--
John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Philosophy
University of Queensland - Blog: scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts
"He used... sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor,
bathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. He was vicious."