African wild dog scent chemistry

Off-topic conversations and chit-chat.

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Hello all

The results of my delving into the chemistry of African wild dog poo and pee, which has piqued some interest on the forum, are available online in the Journal of Chemical Ecology; http://www.springerlink.com/content/q25612243661l211/ .

The full text is free to download until the end of November.

All the best

Peter
Peter Apps
So, is anyone taking the next step and trying to find species specific receptors for the novel compounds?
Thanks,
DR
Image
Hi DR

Remember that we are talking about endangered large carnivores here - not lab mice - so the prospects for molecular biology and neurophysiology are practically non-existent.

Also I am nearly certain that a compound being found only in African wild dogs is not because it only occurs in that species, but because so few other carnivores have had their scent chemistry looked at in any detail. Hard though it is to credit, the last time that anyone analysed wolf, coyote or fox urine was in the 1980s when the hardware and techniques were nowhere near as good as they are now, and would have missed several of the compounds that we found.

Peter
Peter Apps
There was a project on making artificial wolf urine at the University of Umea in the late 90-ties I think. The idea was that wolf urine would keep the reindeer of the roads and rail tracks (100 reindeer run over by a freight train is not pretty). They never got it to work.
Thanks Petrus

Using carnivore odours as herbivore repellants nearly always fails becuase the herbivores very soon learn that although the area smells of predators there are actually no predators around, and so they go back to business as usual. A high profile plan to use dingo urine to repel kangaroos and wallabies sank without trace when even real dingo urine did not have a reliable effect, repellants have no long term benefit in stopping caribou from licking the salt off roads, lion poo was the basis for a deer and rabbit repellant that looked promising and was commercialised, but is no longer on the market as far as I know, and there are several others.

W. Kent Brown, William K. Hall, Larry R. Linton, Richard E. Huenefeld and Lisa A.Shipley 2000 Repellancy of Three Compounds to Caribou. Wildlife Society Bulletin, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Summer, 2000), pp. 365-371. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3783693

Parsons MH, Blumstein DT (2010) Familiarity Breeds Contempt: Kangaroos Persistently Avoid Areas with Experimentally Deployed Dingo Scents. PLoS ONE 5(5): e10403. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010403

B. BOAG and J.A. MLOTKIEWICZ. EFFECT OF ODOR DERIVED FROM LION FAECES ON BEHAVIOR OF WILD RABBITS. Journal of Chemical Ecology, VoL 20, No. 3, 1994.

Do you have a reference for the Umea work, please.

The BioBoundary is not based on repellancy - in fact we expect that over distances of tens of meters the artificial scent marks will attract wild dogs but that at landscape scale (kilometers) a Bioboundary will influence wild dog movements in the same way as natural wild dog scent marks.

Because a BioBoundary is not a repellant and works a large scales, the fact that small scale movements of coyotes are not influenced by artificially deployed scent marks should not be interpreted as evidence that a BioBoundary will not work;

JOHN A. SHIVIK, RYAN. R. WILSON, LYNNE GILBERT-NORTON 2011 Will an Artificial Scent Boundary Prevent
Coyote Intrusion? Wildlife Society Bulletin 35(4):494–497; 2011; DOI: 10.1002/wsb.68

Lynne Barbara Gilbert-Norton 2009. The Eff ects of Social Status and Learning on Captive Coyote (Canis latrans)
Behavior. PhD Thesis Utah State University. DigitalCommons@USU. http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd/514.

Peter
Peter Apps
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