Sampling Technique Could Sniff Out Panda Pheromones

Giant pandas might live miles apart in the wild, so they leave scent marks over long distances to find ready and willing mates. The confines of panda captivity aren’t great for this courting process. So zoos struggling to sustain the endangered species want to know which pheromones are related to mating behaviors. Now, Abbey Wilson, a graduate student at Mississippi State University, has developed methods in collaboration with the Memphis Zoo to reliably detect would-be pheromones. With Mississippi State professors Darrell Sparks and Ashli Brown, Wilson found conditions suitable for collecting a suite of volatile organic compounds—candidate pheromones—onto a solid-phase microextraction fiber. Corroborating work from other teams, Wilson has tentatively identified short-chain fatty acids that change in concentration when a female panda is in heat. The biological significance of the changes won’t be clear until Wilson’s collaborators perform behavioral studies with pandas. The team hopes its work could foster more natural breeding in zoos. As Brown put it, “We’d love to find chemicals that say, ‘I’m a female bear looking for some action.’ ”