African Painted Dogs © 2024 by Oliver Peterson is licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Picture this: you are an African painted dog trotting through the open plains of Sub-Saharan Africa. You are usually with your pack, sometimes drifting out from the pack to explore a bush or two, maybe even finding some prey to hunt down with your friends. One day while you’re out exploring, you come across an unfamiliar place. You can’t quite see any of your friends from the pack, and you definitely can’t hear them, licking the dirt won’t help either– this is the first time your paws have been on this land. There is only one thing that can help you find out who’s been here before, and that is your sense of smell!
The African painted dog has an incredible sense of smell! Their noses can pick up even the tiniest mouse from a mile away. For the painted dogs, this is a very important part of their daily life. From hunting prey, to recognizing territories, their mighty noses make many parts of their lives much easier! Many different animals use their sense of smell to recognize each other, but we still don’t know exactly how well African painted dogs use their sense of smell– until now.
Recently, a group of scientists was interested in their incredible noses, and thought of an experiment to put them to the test. In their experiment, the scientists put different painted dogs into two big rooms, each with a bed of straw. After the dogs spent time sleeping on the straw bed, their scent had rubbed off on it. The scientists then moved the straw to the other room with a different dog in it and watched to see how they reacted.
After days of replacing the straw, taking videos of the painted dogs, and writing down what they found, they came to a conclusion. In the videos, they saw that the painted dogs were able to tell which straw had their scent and which straw had the scent of other dogs! The scientists noticed that when a dog was sniffing its own straw, it would only sniff for a moment. They also found that when a dog was sniffing straw from a different dog, it spent a long time sniffing the scent. When a dog was sniffing straw from a dog they had never met, they took even longer to take in the scent. On top of all of that, they also found that the dogs could tell if the scent was from a female or male dog! Though we humans have many skills that the African painted dog doesn’t, it sure would be nice to know who touched your Halloween candy by sniffing the container, or know who’s coming to your house before you even hear them knock on the door.
So you might be wondering, why is this important? This experiment has given scientists lots of useful knowledge on the way that African painted dogs interact with each other. With this knowledge, conservation biologists, the scientists who help protect animals in the wild, have a better understanding of the way the painted dogs act. In the future, if the painted dog faces trouble with surviving in the wild, scientists will have a better understanding of how they can help them. This experiment can could be very useful for future scientists who want to learn more about the African painted dog and make new experiments to better understand how they live.
Ake, K., Hashimoto, M., & Kutsukake, N. (2024, June 8). Odour discrimination in African painted dogs. Animal Behaviour. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347224001295
