There's more to a pair of rat noses than meets the eye. Like tiny, leashless dogs, rats like to sniff each other all over when they meet. Yet not all of this sniffing is aimed at gathering scents. Some of it seems to transmit messages such as "I'm in charge" or "Be cool" or "Please don't bite my face."
Rats and other animals give off odors from the "face, flanks, and anogenital region," says neuroscientist Daniel Wesson of Case Western Reserve University. So it's not surprising that these regions are where rats aim their sniffers when they cross paths. To find out whether there might be more going on, though, Wesson outfitted rats with head-mounted devices that measured the speed of their sniffs. Then, after recording videos of these rats encountering each other, he looked at how sniff frequency lined up with different stages of the rodents' interaction.
He saw ...
