Pheromones

In Our Time: Science

BBC

History

4.5 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 21 February 2019

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how members of the same species send each other invisible chemical signals to influence the way they behave. Pheromones are used by species across the animal kingdom in a variety of ways, such as laying trails to be followed, to raise the alarm, to scatter from predators, to signal dominance and to enhance attractiveness and, in honey bees, even direct development into queen or worker. The image above is of male and female ladybirds that have clustered together in response to pheromones. With Tristram Wyatt Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford Jane Hurst William Prescott Professor of Animal Science at the University of Liverpool and Francis Ratnieks Professor of Apiculture and Head of the Laboratory of Apiculture and Social Insects at the University of Sussex Producer: Simon Tillotson

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts.
0:05.0	Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time.
0:07.0	There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC in our time. I hope you
0:15.2	enjoy the programs.
0:16.2	Hello, in 1959, scientists discovered pheromones, the chemical signals that make so many
0:22.0	animals act without thinking or needing to think.
0:24.8	Ants marching in a line follow pheromones.
0:27.4	Queen bees keep their status in the hive with them.
0:30.0	They're the instant code word for bees to swarm, to attack or flee,
0:34.0	and are the great unconscious signal of sexual attraction across so many species.
0:38.0	Insects, fish and mammals use them to advance the cause of their own species.
0:42.0	As for humans, that's debatable as we'll hear.
0:45.4	With me to discuss pheromones are Tristram Wyatt, senior research fellow at the Department of Zoology
0:50.7	at the University of Oxford, Jane Hurst, William Preskid Professor of Animal
0:55.0	Science at the University of Liverpool, and Frances Ratniac's Professor of Apiculture and Head of the Laboratory
1:00.3	of Apiculture and Social Insects at the University of Sussex.
1:03.6	Tristramy, what were the first inklings that there was something that could be called pheromones?
1:08.8	Well, we've probably known about signals between animals right from the beginning of hunting.
1:15.0	And our accounts of the ancient Greeks knowing about the way that dogs attracted each other by smell, not by the bark. Charles Darwin in his book
1:26.5	Descent of Man and Sexual Selection writes, during the season of love a musky
1:32.1	odor is emitted by the glands of the crocodile and pervades their haunt and he described smelly ducks smelly elephants smelly goats
1:41.0	but the problem was the quantities were so small they couldn't be identified with the chemistry of the time.
	...

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