Compared to humans communicating with one another through social media platforms like Facebook, and Twitter, new research shows hyenas interact with one another by the bacterial odor coming from their body the Michigan State environment, science, and technology department reported Monday.
"The sour-smelling signals relay reams of information for other animals to read," Kevin Theis, a post-doctoral researcher at Michigan State University told The Register. "Hyenas can leave a quick, detailed message and go. It's like a bulletin board of who's around and how they're doing. Scent posts are bulletin boards, pastes are business cards, and bacteria are the ink, shaped into letters and words that provide information about the paster to the boards' visitors. Without the ink, there is potentially just a board of blank uninformative cards."
Kay Holekamp, a Michigan State Zoologist and co-author of the work, monitored many groups of male and female hyenas with spots and stripes in Kenya.
Scientists did this by using molecular surveys to fully examine the animals' scent glands, and how they differed from one another. Scientists then organized information from the surveys, and other knowledge about odors in other untamed animals. This has led them to want to find out more about the characteristic.
"There have been around 15 prior studies pursuing this line of research," Theis said in a statement. "But they typically relied on culture-based methods, an approach in which many of the similarities and differences in bacterial communities can be lost. If we used those traditional methods, many of the key findings that are driving our research wouldn't be detected at all. Now I just need to get back into the field to test new predictions generated by this study. The next phase of this research will be to manipulate the bacterial communities in hyenas' scent glands to test if their odors change in predictable ways."
Theis has also teamed with MSU researcher Danielle Whittaker to undertake the same research in birds.
