By Susan Milius
Penguins may be able to smell some feathery, waddling whiff of kinship on others of their kind.
In some sniff tests, Humboldt penguins (Spheniscus humboldti) in the Brookfield Zoo outside Chicago could discriminate between the odor of birds they knew and birds they weren’t familiar with, says Jill Mateo of the University of Chicago. More intriguingly, the birds also showed evidence of an ability to distinguish between the scents of relatives and nonrelatives even if they weren’t personally familiar with the scent owners, Mateo and her colleagues report September 21 in PLoS ONE.
The ability to recognize kin by smell has shown up in many other kinds of animals, including mammals, amphibians and fish. Although the new study is limited by its small size, it could be the first to show odor-based kinship recognition among birds.