Violation by Sallie Tisdale Page B

Buss collaborated on the first analysis of the secretion. In 1979, the Rasmussens moved to Portland, where Bets’s husband had an offer to work and teach at the Oregon Graduate Center. Bets received a faculty appointment without salary, giving her access to laboratories but no teaching duties. She was still principally occupied with fish, but as a last favor to Buss she visited the Washington Park Zoo and the elephants.
    â€œThe elephant keepers started to talk to me,” she recalled, “and I said, ‘You know, I’m really interested in this musth thing.’ I got to like the elephant people, got to know them, and one day I met Dr. Schmidt.” One of the first things Schmidt told her concerned the sniff tests and his suspicion that a pheromone was present in the urine. “I thought it was the most fascinating thing I’d ever heard in my whole life. Here was a problem that made everything I was doing with fish look like routine clinical chemistry.”
    She went to the chairman of the Chemistry Department at the Center, an organic chemist named G. Doyle Daves, and repeated what Schmidt had told her. Together, they began studying the urine of elephant cows in estrus, Daves doing the laboratory work of extracting compounds from the urine and Rasmussen the biological checks, recording the urine-testing reaction of the bulls to the laboratory samples. Their timing was based on Schmidt’s blood data, and the keepers took responsibility for collecting the urine.
    Urine collection changed the routine at the zoo in a permanent way. Whenever the designated cow of the day began to urinate, one of the keepers had to grab a bucket and race to catch the splattering stream. (There was no telling when this might occur. “Elephants can cross their legs till their eyeballs float,” Roger Henneous says.) The keepers were lucky to collect twenty liters from a cow in her fertile period; Bets, admitting to a chronic fear of runningout of elephant urine, still keeps gallons of it in her freezers at the Center.
    A few months into the work of chemical extraction, Daves left the Center for Lehigh University, and Bets was alone, without funding. “I was absolutely devastated,” she told me. “I was not trained as an organic chemist. I was a biochemist, which is very different. I had no choice—if I didn’t do the lab work myself I’d have to drop the project.” She began borrowing equipment and teaching herself to use it; she has since learned to repair it as well.
    One of the central questions in pheromone research is that of transportation: how does the chemical signal move from, say, the female to the male, and how does the male perceive it? Most of the identified insect pheromones are dissipated on the wind in gaseous form. But mammals appear to have a more elaborate, intimate method. It is common, even daily, practice among mammal species for a male to check a female’s secretion by sniffing and licking her urine, her genital mucus, and her saliva. Often a female will assist in the process by standing still, moving her tail, or even politely urinating a small amount nearby. The male accomplishes his testing in a very specific way, by a behavior known as flehmen. Classic flehmen is a grimace—an expression of bared teeth, curled upper lip, and open mouth. Both sexes of moose, giraffes, cattle, sheep, and goats, seeking information not only about fertility but also about status and identity, demonstrate classic flehmen. The curious expression, with its appearance of casual disdain, is thought to bring, by tongue and nostril movements, a bit of pheromone into the vomeronasal organ, a chemosensor present in almost every mammalian species and also in reptiles. (It is vestigial in human beings, with anatomical remnants visible in skull sections.) The vomeronasal organ is distinct from the olfactory system and is separately connected to the brain; in snakes, in fact, it is