A brand new research exhibits that snakes seem to reply in another way to their very own scent when it has been altered, which may imply that they possess some type of self-recognition.
A sequence of animals comparable to horses, roosters, and fish have proven indicators of self-awareness in what is named the mirror check. The check entails placing paint on an space of the animal’s physique that they’ll’t see with no mirror, comparable to their brow.
If the animal appears within the mirror and touches the mark, this implies that they’re conscious that the reflection is of themselves relatively than one other animal of the identical species.
“But snakes and most reptiles primarily interact with their world through scent,” says Noam Miller at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. Miller and his colleagues, subsequently, determined to conduct a smell-based model of the mirror check.
The workforce members collected the scents of 36 japanese garter snakes and 18 ball pythons by wiping cotton pads on their pores and skin. They offered every snake with 5 distinct scents: their very own, their very own with a little bit of olive oil added, simply olive oil, certainly one of one other snake of the identical species, and certainly one of one other snake with a little bit of olive oil.
