The Scent Of Love: How Smells Affect Attraction In Humans And Animals

Call it "love at first sniff." In animals and humans, scent plays a bigger role in romance than you might think. Take the Coquerel's sifaka, a type of lemur. New research published in the journal Animal Behavior shows that two sifakas start mimicking the other's scent-marking behavior early on in courtship. "It's like singing a duet, but with smells instead of sounds," Duke University scientist Christine Drea, co-author of the lemur study, said in a statement.