Violation by Sallie Tisdale Page A

O. Wilson calls their “efficiency”: they are among the most potent biologically active chemicals known, able to transmit complex information in tiny amounts over long distances for long periods. The Texas leaf-cutting ant, for instance, can point the way to food by leaving a trail some hundred yards long, which can be found and followed for months. The extreme dilution of the chemicals makes their identification exceedingly tedious for the researcher. The silkworm moth responds to only a few molecules of a certain chemical; hundreds of thousands of moths are needed to produce ten milligrams. Two hundred thousand fire ants must be sacrificed to collect a quarter of a milligram of a pheromone. Furthermore, many of the pheromones isolated so far have been new compounds.
    Mammalian pheromones have proved much more difficult to identify than insect pheromones. Among mammals, pheromones have been clearly identified only in male pigs, in female marmosets and springboks, and in both male and female guinea pigs, hamsters, and mice—though it is thought that all mammals (with the possible exception of human beings) use them. In every species, it is the sex pheromones—with all they imply about behavior and free will, and the potential for use in husbandry—that are of the most interest. The typical exchange involves chemicals used by the female to attract the male; occasionally, the malewill draw the female. Another insect example is that of an arrestant chemical found in certain mites and mosquitoes: it calls the male to an immature female and forces him to attend her until she is ready to mate. Pheromones exert a disturbing amount of control, fostering attraction, repulsion, a willingness to wait, to consort, to surrender. I was delighted when I first read of the male pig’s pheromone: his salivary glands secrete a steroid related to testosterone, and when he spits in a sow’s face she immediately takes up a spread-leg position, ripe for the taking. (This same steroid, it happens, is found in truffles.) But, being a mammal myself, the longer I considered the possibilities the more uncomfortable I became.
    Much of what I know of pheromones I have learned from Bets Rasmussen. If she succeeds in isolating an elephant sex pheromone, it could be a turning point in the fight to restore and preserve the species. She talks of the possibility of chemical “fences” in the wild to attract elephants to preserves and hold them there, and of a stimulant to encourage breeding in zoos and facilitate sperm collection for artificial insemination. There is, too, she admits, the joy of solitary research: the voyage into the unknown and the delight of discovery. “Mammalian pheromones are just now being isolated,” she explained. “Substances that were identified as pheromones in some of the early work have turned out to be impurities. Mammals are more complicated organisms than insects, and they have pheromones doing a variety of things. Even if you’re thinking just sex pheromones, you have to separate the mating process into its components: attraction, pre-copulatory behavior, actual copulation. There may be more than one pheromone acting at each stage.”
    In 1976, Bets Rasmussen was raising two children while she did independent research on the interaction, in sharks and other primitive fish, of the brain and the cerebrospinal fluid. She lived in Pullman, Washington, where her husband, an atmospheric scientist, was teaching at Washington State University. In the lab one day, she met a biologist named Irven Buss, who was looking for an assistant.
    â€œHe said, ‘You know, I’ve got this really interesting problem I’m working on. I’ve done a lot of work on elephant behavior and elephant reproduction. But I’ve always been interested in chemical communication.’ This was a new term to me. So he started to tell me his ideas about temporal-gland secretion.” She and