A new study has found that older Asian bull elephants produce a complex chemical cocktail which the younger males do not produce. This chemical secretion actually helps them appear more attractive to females than their younger competition. Well, the older bulls do know how to keep their females attracted to them this way…hmmm, don’t think older humans have any of such stuff, but I bet they would be ready to pay heavily if such a thing could work for them. There’s a commercial research prospect for you.
There is a time in a male elephant’s life (once every year ) in which it becomes rather aggressive. This period is called musth. A musth elephant is primed to mate, and fights other bull elephants, attacks other animals, and may destroy inanimate objects in its way. Musth bulls produce a distinctive low-frequency vocalization, the musth rumble, have thick secretions from their temporal glands (the duct from the temporal gland opens between the eye and the ear), and continuously dribble urine. Testosterone levels are at a peak in musth males and probably regulate this extreme form of reproductive behavior.
So, all bull elephants enter this musth period, and all produce secretions of the sex pheromone frontalin . It is a component of a dark, oily substance produced in this period from a temporal gland on each side of its head about midway between the eye and the ear. This frontalin can be of two types, or enantiomers. These two types of frontalin molecules are mirror images of each other. Both types are produced, but it is the ratio of the enantiomers that is important. Young males produce a very biased cocktail, favoring one enantiomer over the other, almost completely, and this cocktail smells rather honey like. The older ones however, produce a balanced secretion, where each enantiomer is present in equal amount. But this secretion has a rather foul smell. This change in secretion happens to a bull elephant usually when he is over 30 years old. Ovulating female elephants are extremely attracted by this balancing act of the older bulls, while the competition, the younger bulls get psyched out and may even run for it.
Want to hear an how elephant sounds in musth? You can go to http://www.elephantvoices.org/ and look at this excellent site. It has a large number of fantastic elephant sounds and fabulous pictures of elephants.Frontalin is not new to biologists, and is actually much better known in insects. In 1969, W. Ginzer first isolated frontalin from the beetle Dendroctonus frontalis Zimmermann, and from which it gets its name. It plays an important role as volatile signal in sytems of chemical communication among many insect species. This beetle is a destructive pest to pine forests in the southeastern
