Dr. Ted Stankowich

So fish, when they are attacked, they will emit chemicals from their body that once they're in the water, other fish use that as a conspecific alarm cue or an alarm cue that something, that death is happening here and you get away.

And so it's found in so many different aquatic species that smelling death will cause other animals to swim away.

In mammals, in terms of spraying, it's so unstudied.

Not many people study spraying skunks.

I don't know why.

They're so fun.

But we don't know a lot about how animals respond to skunk odor in their environment.

What we do know is skunks can spray, like they might spray your dog intentionally, liquid gets on their face, but they can also release a waft of smell.

So sometimes if you're walking around your house and you smell skunk, it might not be that a skunk sprayed a predator or got attacked.

It might just be that they got stressed out and at least a puff of odor.

And it's lingering in the air and it's sort of staying around.

That might be an inadvertent response or it could be a warning to other animals in the area that something happened around here.

There's some sort of scary thing.

But again, we don't know that in mammals for sure.

So our work with coyotes and their responses to skunk oil is kind of mixed.

Generally speaking, they will avoid models that smell strongly of skunks.

But we also use skunk oil in a mixture with other stuff as a lure for carnivores and predators.

So if it smells like skunk oil and death, it can be an attractant.

If it just smells purely like skunk oil and it's on a skunk model, like on a thing that looks like a skunk that does not look dead, they tend to shy away from it.

So it's context-dependent.