A Question of Balance :: 5:00am 23rd Nov 2017

Original air date - A Question of Balance :: 7:30pm 21st Nov 2017

Making Sense of Smell Associate Professor Clare Macarthur, from the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Sydney, reports on research that shows how wallabies exploit eucalypt plant behaviour intended to discourage foraging. Plants have ways to reduce the amount they are eaten by their herbivore enemies, both insects and mammals. In Australian forests, eucalypts release odours when they are being munched, essentially a cry for help. However, herbivores, such as wallabies exploit the odours emitted, using them to find the plants rather than foraging randomly. Wallabies use an incredible sense of smell (wallaby noses are actually more sensitive than gas chromatography) to find plants even in the dynamics of forests with wind swirling and smells wafting around. Eucalypts, it seems, can be smelt at greater distances than they can be seen. Most of the mathematical models used to look at foraging completely ignored the fact that animals even have perceptual senses....let alone that sight may not be the most important or refined sense. In addition, because humans are so sight-oriented it is hard to even imagine a landscape from the dimension of smell but for wallabies odour seems to be the key.