Chemical defense

Defensive odours

The best-known example of a vertebrate that uses odour for defense is the North American skunk. When threatened, skunks perform a visual warning. However, if this fails to deter a potential attacker, they produce an odorous spray from anal glands that are located on each side of the anus. The secretion contains several major and minor components that vary slightly among species. The compounds most offensive to humans are thiols. In addition, two of the three species whose secretions have been analyzed produce secretions containing acetates of thiols. These acetates slowly break down in air, giving rise to thiols and contributing to the persistence of the odour.

  • When threatened, skunks release an odorous spray from their anal glands. The spray contains several compounds, including thiols, which produce an offensive smell to humans, and acetates of thiols, which break down slowly, contributing to the persistence of the odour.
    Thomas Kitchin & Victoria Hurst—First Light/Getty Images

Many insects also produce compounds that volatilize in contact with air and are effective repellents for potential predators. The glands producing the compounds are distributed on various parts of the body. Many adult plant-sucking bugs have glands that open in front of the hind legs, and the products of these glands are released if the insect is touched, producing an unpleasant smell and giving rise to the common name “stinkbug.” Many beetles also produce defensive compounds, and some stick insects and a few grasshoppers produce compounds in a spray that can be ejected a distance of 40 cm (16 inches). Many different compounds are employed by different species to produce these defensive compounds. Often, strong odours are conspicuous in species that produce poisons, and the odour plays an important role in learning by predators, thus enhancing the protective effect of the poisons.

  • Stinkbugs such as Edessa rufomarginata release compounds that volatilize on contact with air and are effective repellents for potential predators.
    Stinkbugs such as Edessa rufomarginata release compounds that volatilize on contact …
    E.S. Ross

Defensive tastes

A wide variety of plants, marine animals, arthropods, and vertebrates produce chemicals that are bitter to humans and distasteful to other vertebrate predators. Some of the animals acquire the chemicals from plants. Alkaloids are commonly used by all these groups, although a variety of other chemicals may be found. Iridoid glycosides, occurring in a number of plant families, are sequestered by checkerspot butterfly larvae and other insects that feed on the plants. These compounds are highly deterrent to ants and mammals. However, it should be noted that not all nonvolatile defensive chemicals are detected by the animals that encounter these plants and animals, and, if the chemicals are toxic, avoidance must depend on learning to associate illness with the flavour of the food that has been most recently eaten. In arthropods some defensive chemicals, such as quinones, phenols, acids, and bases, have deterrent effects that stimulate vertebrate receptors involved in conveying sensations of burning or irritation to the brain via the trigeminal nerve.

Predator chemical cues and prey escape

Predator chemicals may be detected by some animals, although in most cases it is not known exactly how the chemicals are detected. For example, rabbits detect and move considerable distances away from feces of carnivorous mammals, and kangaroo rats drum with their hind feet, probably as a warning to others, if they detect the odour of a predator. Salamanders move away from substrates that are tainted by chemicals deposited by their snake predators, and they move out of waters that contain chemicals from fish predators. The anal sac secretions and urine of foxes have a range of volatile sulfur-containing compounds. The main compound studied is trimethyl triazoline, which causes freezing behaviour in rats. Stoat anal sac chemicals cause alarm in snowshoe hares.

Among aquatic invertebrates, such as rotifers, crustaceans, and insects, there are many examples of sensitivity to predator chemicals that induce adaptive changes in behaviour or morphology. For example, in the water flea genus Daphnia, chemicals from predatory fish influence vertical migration patterns that reduce predation by fish. Chemicals from the predatory back swimmer bug in the genus Notonecta act as a predation cue by altering the response to light of Daphnia. This cue warns Daphnia of Notonecta’s presence, giving it an opportunity to escape predation by the bugs. Barnacles on intertidal rocks normally produce a volcano-shaped armour. However, a specialist gastropod predator can breach this armour, unless the barnacle grows in a bent shape with the opening to the side. Young barnacles will develop either the volcano or the bent shape, depending on whether chemicals from the predator are absent or present in the water. How the chemicals induce these effects is unclear.

  • Aquatic bugs such as the common back swimmer (Notonecta glauca) release chemicals into water. These chemicals act as predation cues that influence the behaviour of crustaceans such as water fleas (Daphnia).
    Aquatic bugs such as the common back swimmer (Notonecta glauca) release chemicals into …
    E van Herk
  • Gooseneck barnacles (Lepas) are found on intertidal rocks. The growth of their exterior armour is influenced by chemicals secreted into the surrounding water by gastropod predators.
    Gooseneck barnacles (Lepas) are found on intertidal rocks. The growth of their exterior …
    Norbert Wu/Planet Earth Pictures

Effects of experience

Changes in response to odour and taste may occur very rapidly. For example, a tendency to respond to an attractive food odour will decline if the food is out of reach, and many animals habituate to flavours that are mildly distasteful on first encounter. On repeated encounters the flavours no longer elicit repellence or deterrence. However, most marked effects of chemosensory experience are of longer duration, lasting days, weeks, years, or in some cases a lifetime. Sometimes the chemoreceptive capacity is affected by experience, whereas other times the olfactory lobe structure or other integrative centres of the brain are affected.

  • Learn how researchers investigate the mechanism of “predictive coding,” by which the olfactory area of the brain is able to anticipate specific smells.
    Learn how researchers investigate the mechanism of “predictive coding,” by which the …
    Courtesy of Northwestern University (A Britannica Publishing Partner)

Early experience

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Effects of early experience on odour and taste preferences have been studied in many animals, especially insects and mammals. For example, some caterpillars that feed on only one of several equally acceptable host plant species will subsequently ignore or refuse the alternatives. In the larvae of the cabbage butterfly, the taste receptors develop a reduced sensitivity to mild deterrents in the experienced host and an enhanced sensitivity to the plant-specific phagostimulants.

  • Exposure to certain tastes and odours early in life can affect an animal’s food preferences. For example, chemicals in foods eaten by a lactating mother rat may be transmitted through the milk to the offspring, conditioning taste preferences in the young before they begin eating solid food.
    age fotostock/SuperStock

In several species of mammals, food preferences have been shown to be influenced in utero by the mother’s diet. Chemicals from the maternal diet reach the fetus and cause long-lasting increases in the acceptance of foods containing the same chemicals. For example, young rabbits, whose mothers ate food containing juniper in the late stages of pregnancy, will, when subsequently weaned, exhibit a preference for juniper and even for the odour of juniper. This occurs regardless of whether, during weaning, they are fed by a different female who has not experienced juniper, indicating that the effect is not the result of a compound in the mother’s milk. The effect results from an increase in the sensitivity to the odour of juniper in the young rabbit’s olfactory epithelium. However, whether this arises through an increase in the frequency of a particular receptor type or an increase in sensitivity of existing receptors is not known. Comparable changes have been shown to occur in the preference of human babies for carrots, although the precise nature of the underlying mechanism has not been demonstrated.

Lactating females also can influence the later food preference of their offspring via chemicals ingested in the milk. This has been demonstrated in rats, ruminants, and other animals; the food preferences of young livestock are conditioned before the young begin to eat solid food. In rats the process continues after weaning, with weanlings preferring to eat foods with odours accumulated on the mother’s fur or in her breath. Such imprinting has been found in other contexts. For example, homing animals make use of odours experienced early in life to help them return to their natal place (see above Behaviour and chemoreception: Homing).

Associative learning

A more plastic experiential change is seen in associations that develop at least to some extent in all animals with a central nervous system. An individual develops an association between sensory inputs (e.g., chemicals) and the important positive or negative effects experienced. Most studies have involved foraging and feeding behaviour. Parasitic wasps learn to associate the presence of a host such as a caterpillar with the more prominent odours of the host’s substrate (i.e., accumulated feces). Honeybees learn to associate particular floral odours with the presence of nectar rewards. Such learning often involves visual cues as well as chemical cues and increases foraging efficiency, minimizing time spent on fruitless searching when suitable resources are abundant. Among bees, nest mates learn the floral odours picked up by foragers returning with food. The bees can use these odours to localize the food source in the field, after other signals have brought them to the general area.

  • A blue iris (Iris) with contrasting yellow nectar guides indicating the location of the nectar to the honeybee (Apis mellifera). Flecks of pollen grains dislodged from the stamens by the foraging bee can be seen on the bee’s body.
    A blue iris (Iris) with contrasting yellow nectar guides indicating the location of the …
    © G.A. Maclean/Oxford Scientific Films

Specific nutritional learning of flavours has also been demonstrated in various animal groups. For example, chemicals associated with complementary food sources, such as high protein and high carbohydrates, can be learned. This enables locusts, rats, cattle, and humans to choose the food type most needed at a particular time and thus, over a period of time, achieve a suitable balance between the two classes of nutrients. This ability is often combined with learned aversions to foods lacking specific nutrients. In the laboratory, slugs learn to reject a food lacking a single nontasted essential amino acid on the basis of the food flavour, and rats learn to reject a food lacking a single vitamin. Typically, the aversion to the flavour of the nutritionally inadequate food is accompanied by an increased attractiveness of novel flavours. Thus, aversion learning helps to increase the nutritional quality of the overall diet. In obtaining an ideal diet, generalist feeders are thought to use positive associative learning, aversion learning, and attraction to novel flavours. Over time, as conditions and needs change, new associations can develop.

How an animal determines that it has some specific nutritional deficiency is uncertain in most cases. In locusts the concentrations of some amino acids in the blood are of particular importance. In these insects the sensitivity of taste receptors to sugars and amino acids varies. If these insects are not ingesting enough protein, the responses of their receptors to amino acids are enhanced; if they are not ingesting enough carbohydrate, responses to sucrose are enhanced. If these nutrients are reliable indicators of carbohydrate and protein levels in food, variable sensitivity to them adds to the value of learned associations.

A danger for many omnivorous or polyphagous species is that potential food items may be poisonous. When an herbivore encounters a novel food that smells and tastes acceptable, the animal eats small amounts of it. If illness occurs, the illness is associated with the novel flavour or the flavour of the most recently eaten food, which is excluded from the diet thenceforth. This kind of aversion learning has been demonstrated in many species of insects, mollusks, fish, mammals, and other animals that have brains; it apparently does not occur in the phylum Cnidaria, since these organisms have only simple nerve nets. In mammals the senses of taste and smell play somewhat different roles in aversion learning. A novel odour alone is relatively ineffective and must be followed immediately by an aversive feedback to produce strong odour-aversion learning. However, strong aversions to flavours (taste and smell together) can be conditioned even when aversive feedback is delayed by up to 12 hours. When a weak odour is combined with a distinctive flavour and is followed by illness, the weak odour itself becomes a strong and long-term aversive stimulus.

Thus, the learned association between flavour and post-feeding distress occurs with respect to diets lacking important nutrients and foods that are poisonous. Apart from foraging and food selection, certain animals learn chemical cues associated with predators, competitors, mates, and kin or social group, enabling them to behave in the most appropriate ways.

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