Do butterflies smell (and what of)? Pyrazines?

Do butterflies smell of cigars?

[First published in June 2005 Bulletin of the Amateur Entomologist's Society, page 119]

During last summer I was able to answer this improbable enquiry ...

In July a British entomologist, Leonard Winokur [New Scientist
"The Last Word"], mentioned that "males of many species [of butterfly] have
special scales that release scent ... They may smell of flowers, cigars and even chocolate".

Marc Abrahams asked, do they really smell of cigars?

One early reference (C.G. Barrett: The Lepidoptera of the British Isles, 1892) records that the pale clouded yellow, Colias hyale, has the scent of pine-apple - an observation attributed to "Mr Farren"*.

E.B. (Edmund Brisco) "Henry" Ford in his widely read 'New Naturalist' volume "Butterflies" (1945) tabulates the scents of a few British butterflies and includes two which smell of old cigar boxes.

He derived his table from work by F.A. Dixey (Proceedings of the
Entomological Society of London pp.lvi-lx, 1904) and G.B. Longstaff
(Entomologist's Monthly Magazine 41: 112-114, 1905). These gentlemen
also identified male butterflies smelling of chocolate sweetmeats.
This was in some cases confirmed by two ladies, maybe Mrs Dixey and Mrs Longstaff, presumably owners of more educated noses.

Uptodate information on male butterfly scents comes from Johan Andersson of Stockholm, who told Jennifer Viegas (Discovery News, March 3, 2004) that methyl salicylate, produced by the Green-veined white, Pieris napi, puts rival males off mating.
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20040301/antisex_print.html

My thanks to Johan Andersson for pointing out some earlier papers (Bergstrom, 1973; Tinbergen, 1942 and others). He tells me the scale odour of P. napi is citral, a blend of neral and geranial, "a common flowersmell".

There is a list of sex pheromones of Lepidoptera,
http://www-pherolist.slu.se The Pherolist.
See also http://www.phero.net/

No cigars, only sandalwood, or "old cigar boxes". Now I wonder, what
do cigars smell of, if not old butterflies?

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* Possibly Wm Farren?
Farren W (1904) The insects of Cambridgeshire. Introduction. pp139-141. The lepidoptera of Cambridgeshire. pp161-172. In Marr and Shipley (1904)
i.e. Marr JE & Shipley AE (1904) Handbook to the natural history of Cambridgeshire. Cambridge: Uuniversity Press. Not to be confused with Harmer SF & Shipley AE The Cambridge Natural History. London: Macmillan.

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Further reading:
Miriam ROTHSCHILD: Butterfly cooing like a dove. Doubleday, 1991.
Vladimir NABOKOV: Speak memory - an autobiography revisited. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967. Glory - a novel. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972.
Kurt JOHNSON & Steven COATES: Nabokov's blues - the scientific odyssey of a literary genius. Zoland Books, 1999.

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http://education.guardian.co.uk/obituary/story/0,,1396144,00.html

Obituary
Dame Miriam Rothschild Zoologist, naturalist, academic and eccentric who was the Queen Bee of research into parasites and their hosts

Anthony Tucker and Naomi Gryn
Saturday January 22, 2005 The Guardian

They called her the Queen Bee, and she was. Dame Miriam Rothschild, who has died aged 96, may have had little formal education but, without aspiring to academic status, she was so expert in so many fields that she gathered eight honorary doctorates, from Oxford in 1968 to Cambridge in 1999, and a fellowship of the Royal Society (1985).

...she became fascinated by the amazing range of highly aromatic pyrazines employed in a host of different roles throughout nature. "Squeeze a ladybird very, very gently," she would say, "and its characteristic aroma will be on your fingers, for days if you leave it there. That's pyrazines, and there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of pyrazines, combining to make the aromas of life, from urine, to chocolate, to butterflies, moths and a host of plants. Pyrazines are wonderful, they are universal."

These observations sprang from the childhood memory, still vibrating, that different butterfly and moth species, often captured and kept in the house for a while as natural decorations before being released or replaced, possessed faint, elusive but quite distinctive scents.

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In his autobiography Speak, Memory, Nabokov was to write of a similar awareness when describing a butterfly chase: "the subtle perfume of butterfly wings on my fingers, a perfume which varies with the species - vanilla, or lemon, or musk, or a musty sweetish odour difficult to define." Miriam, inevitably, captured this and other butterfly quotes from him (mostly from the same source, with a couple from his novel Glory), weaving them with a myriad other fragments into her first tapestry of words, experiences and imagination, a bizarre but delightful assembly, more or less about wings, which she called Butterfly Cooing Like A Dove (1991).

Copyright: The Guardian, Anthony Tucker and Naomi Gryn
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