Young Male Elephants Smell Like Honey

Feb. 28 -- For young male elephants, youth is so sweet you can actually smell it.

Researchers have learned that male Asian elephants that have just begun puberty signal their innocence through secretions that smell like honey.

The sweet secretions drip from an olfactory gland between their eyes and ears and make their role clear to other elephants, preventing competitive attacks from their bigger male counterparts.

"The secretions contain acetates, which are present in many flowers," said Bets Rasmussen, a biochemist at the Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology in Beaverton. "The sweet smell tells females that an immature male still has some growing up to do and informs aggressive mature males that they pose no threat."

Cited by Ancient Poets

Rasmussen points out that Hindu poets actually recorded the honey-like smell of young male elephants thousands of years ago. One verse describes the arrival of bees to "gather sweetness from the temples of [young] elephants."

Recently, Heidi Riddle stumbled across the same observation as she herded a young Asian male elephant into the barn at the elephant sanctuary she runs with her husband in Greenbrier, Ark.

The male elephants in her sanctuary had entered musth (pronounced "must"), an annual period of heightened sexual activity. Riddle noticed an immature 11-year-old Asian male elephant was secreting a fluid from its gland.

"I rubbed some off onto my hand and was really surprised — it was a totally different smell," Riddle said. "The first thing that struck me is it smells like raw honey. I thought that was kind of unusual."

Riddle contacted Rasmussen, who soon began investigating the scent. She analyzed samples from Riddle's captive elephants and from wild Asian elephants in south India. Then, with Indian elephant researcher V. Krishnamurthy, she watched how other elephants reacted to the scent in the wild. The three researchers published their results in today's issue of the journal Nature.