R. Brahmachary, J. Dutta
Oct 1, 1981
Citations
0
Influential Citations
22
Citations
Journal
The American Naturalist
Abstract
Pheromones are very well known in the insect world but such chemical messengers in mammals have been studied only recently. True, muscone and civetone, the scents of the musk deer and the civet cat, were thoroughly investigated quite a long time ago but it is only recently that chemical and other aspects of mammalian pheromones have attracted wide attention. Mech and Peters (1977, p. 321) comment that "the study of chemical communication came of age only a year or so ago, with the founding of the Journal of Chemical Ecology. The relatively delayed development of the field resulted from the extreme difficulty encountered in attempting to cope with its subject matter." In the preface to the same symposium Miiller-Schwarze and Mozell (1977) mention that only six mammalian pheromones had been identified chemically prior to 1976. Since then a few more mammalian pheromones have been investigated and the ecological aspects have been revealed at a deeper and interlinked level. As may be expected, trappers, hunters, and poachers had a certain insight into some of these communicatory signals and their way of life called for immediate application of this knowledge. In his biography of a poacher Speakman (1961, p. 153) described a technique of rabbit catching which we would today consider as applied science of pheromones. The poacher said, "In the spring when the buck rabbits were full of the urge to breed I would catch a doe and skin it, scrape up the loose earth from the little latrines that rabbits scoop out for themselves and rub the earth round inside the skin. Then I covered my gin trap with that earth and knew I should catch a buck." The scientist generally has had less first-hand experience with animals in the wild, but recently an ever-increasing number of field ecologists have been visiting the wilderness and studying animals there. Let us first describe, briefly, some of the ecological aspects of the tiger, a most secretive animal. Known until recently only through legendary anecdotes and hunters' tales, the study of the tiger is a virgin field of research. The first scientific study of the tiger in India was published by Schaller (1967). The accumulated experience of hunters and woodmen could be summed up in a very few wordsthe tiger is a nonsocial, nocturnal animal having acute night vision and sense of hearing but with slight or no olfactory powers. Here we will review the relevant social-asocial, territorial, and olfactory aspects of the tiger and then present the results of our studies and the implications thereof. Schaller (1967) found that the territories of females may overlap part of the territory of a male. Sometimes two females and cubs would temporarily associate to form a loose group. Smith (1978) and other members of the Smithsonian team have now radiocollared 50 tigers in Chitawan, Nepal, and this long-term project is likely to yield the most reliable data on the territory of tigers. It is already known that an outsize male tiger allows seven tigresses within his territory. The young males tend to