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In Our Time: Pheromones

21/02/2019

Pheromones

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Pheromones

A discussion of the chemicals that animals use in order to affect others of their species.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how animals influence the behaviour of others of their species by secreting or excreting chemical substances.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how members of the same species send each other invisible chemical signals to influence the way they behave.  Pheromones are used by species across the animal kingdom in a variety of ways, such as laying trails to be followed, to raise the alarm, to scatter from predators, to signal dominance and to enhance attractiveness and, in honey bees, even direct development into queen or worker. 

The image above is of male and female ladybirds that have clustered together in response to pheromones. 

With 

Tristram Wyatt
Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford

Jane Hurst
William Prescott Professor of Animal Science at the University of Liverpool

and 

Francis Ratnieks
Professor of Apiculture and Head of the Laboratory of Apiculture and Social Insects at the University of Sussex

Producer: Simon Tillotson

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