This story's so good, it's difficult to know where to start: The press release that brought me to The Journal of Experimental Biology involved spitting cobras, which seemed quite intriguing. Unfortunately, the paper was not yet available, so I'll recommend you visit Ed Yong's description of the methods used in the paper, which included having a researcher taunt the cobras until they spat venom at him.
While at the journal site, however, I stumbled across a paper entitled "Red junglefowl have individual body odors," which seemed too good to pass up. (For the uninitiated, the red jungle fowl is the wild ancestor of modern domesticated chickens.) It got even better when it turned out that the researchers had discovered that individual birds had a distinctive aroma. They made this discovery as they attempted to find out whether the birds emitted odors based on their social position in the local pecking order. And we mean pecking literally—the study involved "six feather-pecked and six non-pecked birds." The answer to that question was no.
But what really sent the story into complete Weird Science Nirvana was the method used for distinguishing the eau de poule: "an automated olfactometer which assessed the ability of trained mice to discriminate between the odors." That's right: they trained the mice to pick up the scent of the birds, and then used an automated system to figure out what the mice thought about the stench.
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