The Sex Attractant Pheromone of Male Brown Rats: Identification and Field Experiment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Trapping brown rats is challenging because they avoid newly placed traps in their habitat. Herein, we report the identification of the sex pheromone produced by male brown rats and its effect on trap captures of wild female brown rats. Collecting urine- and feces-soiled bedding material of laboratory-kept rats and comparing the soiled-bedding odorants of juvenile and adult males, as well as of adult males and females, we found nine compounds that were specific to, or most prevalent in, the odor profiles of sexually mature adult males. When we added a synthetic blend of six of these compounds (2-heptanone, 4-heptanone, 3-ethyl-2-heptanone, 2-octanone, 2-nonanone, 4-nonanone) to one of two paired food-baited trap boxes, these boxes attracted significantly more laboratory-strain female rats in laboratory experiments, and captured ten times more wild female rats in a field experiment than the corresponding control boxes. Our data show that the pheromone facilitates captures of wild female brown rats.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".