Conclusions
Scent marks need to encode a reliable signal of ownership to inform about the specific owner. Although tests of discrimination have told us much about the abilities of animals to detect differences in conspecific scents deriving from a wide range of sources, we know little about the components involved in scent ownership recognition or individual recognition when animals meet because this requires functional tests of individual recognition. Ownership signals in scent marks need to be stable and persistent, ideally genetically determined and sufficiently polymorphic. Recent work from our laboratory, using functional tests of scent mark recognition, suggest that the pattern of polymorphic MUPs in the urinary scent marks of male house mice provides an ownership signal. The ownership signal is involatile, requiring investigatory contact with the scent source, and involves either involatile complexes between MUPs and their bound odorants or the MUPs themselves, probably detected through the vomeronasal system. However, mice also detect non-MUP related differences in urinary volatiles. We propose a model of learnt association between involatile and volatile components that would allow mice to recognize previously encountered volatile profiles from familiar individuals or animals of the same sex without requiring close contact investigation. Investigation of fresh scent marks deposited around the environment would allow animals to update the proposed association between an individual’s stable involatile profile with any changes in its volatile profile. Further research is required to test this model and to establish its generality in other mammalian species.
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Hurst, J.L., Thom, M.D., Nevison, C.M., Humphries, R.E., Beynon, R.J. (2005). The “scents” of ownership. In: Mason, R.T., LeMaster, M.P., Müller-Schwarze, D. (eds) Chemical Signals in Vertebrates 10. Springer, Boston, MA . https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-25160-X_24
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