Looking with your nose, sticking your nose in other people’s business, getting the lid on your nose: proverbs in which our sense of smell is associated with verbs other than simply ‘smelling’ are usually not too positive. Our nose is there to sniff odors and that’s all there is to it. Or not?
Anyone who takes a closer look around the animal kingdom will see that it is not that simple. Other animal species sometimes use completely different organs to smell. Ants and other insects smell with their antennae and snakes with their tongues. And spiders use their legs to catch chemical attractants.
This also applies to the male wasp spider, research shows, but exactly how this smell worked was not yet known. German and Swedish biologists now reveal in magazine PNAS that the males of the species have special olfactory organs on all their legs to detect the volatile pheromones of females.
Using an electron microscope, they saw thousands of ‘sensory hairs’ with special pores, comparable to insect antennae. Because the organs are missing in female (and immature male) wasp spiders, the researchers suspected that the males use them to detect a partner ready to mate. And indeed: the more sex pheromones floated in the air, the stronger the pores appeared to react.