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Pheromone

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Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior

Synonyms

Chemical communication; Chemical cues; Chemical signals; Semiochemicals

Introduction

In 1959 the chemist Adolf Butenandt and his team identified the first pheromone – the silk moth’s sex pheromone bombykol (Butenandt et al. 1959). This discovery prompted the creation of the word “pheromone” (from the Greek: pherein, to carry or transfer, and hormȯn, to excite or stimulate) (Karlson and Lüscher 1959). Butenandt’s discovery (1959) also established that chemical signals between animals exist and can be identified by researchers.

From the outset, Karlson and Lüscher (1959) anticipated that pheromones would be found across the animal kingdom, from insects and crustaceans to fishes and mammals. Actually it is likely that the majority of species across the animal kingdom use pheromones for various kinds of communication in every habitat on land and underwater (Wyatt 2014). To date, only insects, fishes, and mammals have been studied in any depth, while little is known about the...

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Correspondence to Stefano Vaglio .

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Vaglio, S., Bartels-Hardege, H., Hardege, J. (2022). Pheromone. In: Vonk, J., Shackelford, T.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55065-7_457

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