Thursday 8 July 2010

Science update- the smell of jaguar...

Hi. Welcome (back) to Weirdbeautiful.
Weird wildlife story of the week is this piece (again, it is an extract from the news synopsis magazine "The Week", but a bit more upbeat than the previous extracts were)-

"Calvin Klein's Obsession for Men is one of the world's bestselling colognes- but if you are planning on venturing into a Central American jungle, don't even put it in your washbag says The Guardian [newspaper]. Scientists have noticed that the aftershave is absolutely irresistible to jaguars. Indeed, big cats are so drawn to its rich "animal notes" (it contains a synthetic version of civet, taken from the small mammals of that name) that naturalists have begun using it to lure the creatures into clearings so they can film them. The discovery was first made in 2007, when zookeepers at New York's Bronx Zoo, which is run by the Wildlife Conservation Society... tested a range of scents in an attempt to lure cheetahs to camera traps. Most had little effect, but when Obsession was tried, the creatures lurked for 11 minutres at a time. Researchers in Guatemala have since used Obsession to capture rare footage of jaguars mating. "We're just starting to get an idea of how jaguars behave in their habitat", said the Wildlife Conservation Society's Roan Balas McNab. "Before we used Obsession for Men, we weren't able to get these images at all"."

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