Can misdirection ever be a good thing? When it keeps mice away from planted wheat, the answer is yes.
Now you smell it, now you don’t. Or do you? Used correctly, a little misdirection could help keep mice away from freshly planted wheat seeds.Nature Sustainability.Rodents, including mice, are responsible for nibbling away at 70 million metric tons of cereals every year.
What if the mice couldn’t sniff out the grains at all? Banks and his colleague Finn Parker, also a behavioral ecologist at the University of Sydney, have been working on olfactory camouflage — covering scents with, well, more scents. The technique started with invasive predators who hunt for threatened bird nests by smelling them out. “We thought, well, if we put those odors everywhere, how on Earth can they then find out where the nests actually are,” Banks says.
Before or during sowing, the scientists sprayed mouse-riddled test plots with wheat germ oil, a byproduct of wheat processing that is usually used in cosmetics and animal feed. The oils are the most nutritious parts, Banks says, and the smell of the oils is “what [the mice] are using to find the seeds beneath the ground.”
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