Smell Nice, We’ll Have Sex: Socio-Environmental Lessons from the Japanese Beetle
Scientists will tell you that men have a lot to learn from the animal world in as far as the art of sex is concerned.
This fact was reinforced last week with the announcement that ecologists at the University of California, Davis had isolated scent-emitting enzymes that could be manipulated to prevent sexual activity between males and females of the Japanese beetle as a way of checking their population.
Essentially, this means that scent has been confirmed to play a major social-environmental stimuli role for sexual activity in insects and other animals, like the mammals and even human beings.
The importance of smell in relation to sex has been studied for centuries. Books like The Scent of Eros: Mysteries of Odor in Human Sexuality by James V. Kohl and Robert T. Francoeur and The Scented Ape: The Biology and Culture of Human Odour by David Michael Stoddart offer great insights into human pheromones, the sense of smell, and human sexual behavior.
